


The Wheel

by epistolic



Category: The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-23
Updated: 2012-10-23
Packaged: 2017-11-16 21:18:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/543914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/epistolic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1535, England. As ward to the Earl of Huxley, Loki has been brought up since childhood to be the perfect counterpart to the Earl's only son and heir. But in the cut-throat world of Tudor England, where ambition and opportunism are the only guarantors of success, Loki must decide between loyalty and betrayal; between the past and the future; and between power and love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wheel

**Author's Note:**

> Historical!AU, set in the Tudor period! Written for the [2012 Marvel Big Bang](http://marvel-bang.livejournal.com), in collaboration with three wonderful artists, [almostgaby](http://almostgaby.livejournal.com), [atavistique](http://atavistique.livejournal.com), and [baboo_et_blade](http://baboo-et-blade.livejournal.com). ♥

>   
> _  
> “Yes, but friendship should be less exhausting... it should be restorative. Not like...” More turns to him, for the first time, as if inviting comment. “I sometimes feel it is like... like Jacob wrestling with the angel.”_
> 
> _“And who knows,” he says, “what that fight was about?”_
> 
> _“Yes, the text is silent. As with Cain and Abel. Who knows?”_
> 
> (Hilary Mantel, _Wolf Hall_ )

\--

**[[TRAILER FOR THIS FIC](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78BgbRg9a5I) by the wonderful [almostgaby](http://almostgaby.livejournal.com)!]**

 

_Graveside_  
February, 1535: Southampton

He is being tugged from one nightmare into another. Through the thick, soot-black smog Thor’s hand comes clapping down onto his arm, dragging him up, up, up, out of the ropes that are binding him to the post and into the miasmic air above his own burning; for a moment he looks down at the place where his body was crackling in the flame but a second before, blinking in mild surprise, opening his mouth.

He chokes on a lungful of smoke. He gags, clatters against his desk.

“Where am – Thor?”

Thor is shouting into his face. It is very hard to make out the words. His eyes are still stinging from the wood-smoke, his ears loud with the indecipherable shouts buried now within his dream. A tremble goes through his body with the force of an earthquake – Thor is shaking him.

“ – fire! We have to get out, put your sleeve up over – ”

He drifts. He is asleep on his feet. They are burning me for treason, he tries to say, slow and patient. You are disrupting the order of things. He can feel the crawl of fire over his bones, turning out the marrow in soft little pops of burnt fat, his skin shriveling up. Nobody has packed gunpowder into the post, he thinks; it will not be quick for me. It will be ponderous and painful. He coughs against Thor’s shoulder, then realises he is mashed up close into Thor’s chest – how did that happen? – he is weightless, floating, he is not even touching the ground. He can smell brimstone; he thinks he can smell damnation.

Thor carries him out into the night. The first pang of clean air washes over his body, licks him through his clothes. The moon is high and feverish and they tumble, together, into the long winter grass, rolling a little, Thor’s hair getting into his mouth.

“Loki,” Thor is gasping against him. “Are you – is everything – ”

He looks up at Thor’s face, lit sideways by the fire. He is filled with something terrible. He thinks, I have just crawled out of my death; I am damned anyway; he puts his mouth on Thor’s mouth.

The darkness chases him, trailing corners into his vision.

He allows himself this one weakness. He falls gently into it, like a man condemned. Tomorrow, once the sun rises up, we shall return to reality; but for now, since we are still in the dark, we are allowed to dream.

\--

Four rooms, including his, have been burned to the ground.

After much yelling, Thor lets him out of bed. But Thor is still hovering by his side as if he is two seconds from toppling over. Never mind. He is looking down at the charred bits of wood, the curlicues of metal recast from their originals: the silver box he kept on his desk for letters; the little brass washbasin.

“My papers,” he says. His throat is so dry. “All of my correspondence, all the account-books.”

“Are they all gone?”

“Yes.”

Thor picks at a bit of brick with his toe. “Can none of it be salvaged? Perhaps we could ask the servants, they have not yet gone through all of the wreckage. If you’d like.”

“Was anyone hurt?” He is thinking, I hope we don’t need to pay anyone off.

“No. You know how most of the rooms around yours are empty.”

“I will need to write to Morton.”

“Not today, surely. You need to rest.”

“We can’t leave half of the house gaping open. We’ll need – bricklayers. Where’s Richard? We’ll need woodworkers and some glaziers up from Venice, I need Richard to send a letter off to – ”

He is already pacing the edge of the rubble. He is feeling hard, brittle. He is acutely aware of where Thor is standing and that is unnerving. He knows he looks a bit like a bird flushed out from the bushes and he doesn’t like it, this sudden way of not being able to look Thor in the eye.

Half the household is milling about now, murmuring and uselessly shifting debris.

Ah, there is Richard.

Thor takes him by the arm. “Loki, you should go back inside. You breathed in a great deal of smoke yesterday, you are not well.”

“I am perfectly well. Richard, there you are, did you fall into a pothole between your rooms and here? You are half a day late.” He shakes Thor off. “Get everyone back inside, they are just getting in the way.”

“You have a cut on your head.”

His fingers inch along it. “I’m not made of glass, Thor.”

Out of the corner of his eye he sees Thor give up. Thor’s great, broad shoulders, encased in green satin slashed with mulberry, bend down unhappily. It has been three years since Thor came back from the French court but there is still this lost look about him, like he’s been handed a map in a foreign language. What are the current exchange rates in Florence? How much for a shipment of Spanish tiles? What is the best way to bone a pheasant? These are the things he ticks off on his fingers. But Thor would look at you, head tipped, lips parted slightly in confusion: _pourquoi?_

“Richard,” he is saying, “we will need this all done before the summer sets in properly.”

The place behind his eyes is starting to ache. As he notices Thor leaving out of the corner of his eye, a part of him slips out from a gap in his ribcage and skitters across the grass: he almost calls Thor back.

\--

The afternoon sees him pounding up the stairs. The door to Odin’s room is open; he meets Thor coming out in his riding clothes, a thick coat of mud on his boots.

“You,” he says. He is shaking with anger. He is on guard, skittish, easy to startle. The thing about who he is, about waking up in the morning to a desk full of papers and the day’s letters wrist-deep while Thor rides out jauntily with the hunting dogs, is that nothing is done without him. Money passes through his hands before it passes out of the door. The servants say, master, may I move this tapestry? May I file this letter? He takes a rough hold of Thor’s elbow, folds his fingers over the joint like he’s locking it in. “There is a priest outside.”

“Yes,” Thor says. “I sent for him.”

“Without consulting me?”

Mortimer comes backing out of the room. The doctor is a small man, shuffling. He looks as if a puff of wind would blow him down the street. White tufts of hair peek out haphazardly from under his black cap, and even his voice is wheezy: “Hush, masters. The Earl is asleep.”

He rounds on him. “You told me that he would last the summer. That he would see another New Year.”

“Loki,” Thor says, “you know that these things can’t be certain.”

“I was told it was certain.”

“He has taken a fresh fever. It is not his old illness.” Mortimer’s voice is soothing, like he’s trying to calm a wild horse. “Perhaps it is from the smoke of the fire last night. He is a very old man, you cannot tell with these things.”

He won’t have any of this. He won’t be shushed and placated like a child. He wants to say, there are things that still need to be done; I had plans for this place, and they are evaporating before my eyes.

He lets go of Thor’s arm, pushes past Mortimer’s dusty shoulder. “I am going in.” 

Mortimer bleats, “But master, the Earl is – ”

“I don’t care.”

He closes the door. The room enfolds him immediately: it is like burrowing your way into the womb. It is like going back into the place you were born. For him, Loki, this is a nameless room in a nameless farmhouse, or perhaps a barn – you picture a squalling knuckle of flesh; you picture the damp smell of old hay and rat droppings. You picture a harsh winter. There is a woman there, a still, white slip of a thing, dead before he is named. He was five when he rode his first horse; he was five when he first fell off one. He hid in closets and learned French that way, eavesdropping on Thor’s tutors. He scrapped with the yard boys and learned to load carts. He peeled apples. He ran away to Florence. He came back, then ran away again. He has looked at Thor and seen the way sunlight falls, graceful, across Thor’s shoulders. He has seen the line of Thor’s jaw and the smooth stretch of his throat. 

Ask anyone in London and they will say, oh, Loki? Who knows which gutter he crawled up out of.

He can see the faint shape of Odin’s body under the blankets. He does not know why he is so affected by something that has been creeping up for two years, like a cat in the grass. 

Thor raps on the door behind his back. “Loki, are you alright?”

Downstairs the damage from the fire is being catalogued. Clerks are going around with sheaves of paper and quills between their teeth. It is hard to imagine exactly what a fire can do – the way the air sucks it out through the windows, the way it routs every room and leaves the foundations trembling. 

He has often thought: I never loved this man as a father, and he did not treat me as a son. 

So then, what?

He puts his hands behind his back. The sleeve of Thor’s riding jacket had been smeared with soot. He folds his fingers into a curt fist; he tucks the black of his palm away, silently, stowing it out of plain sight.

“You can call in the priest now,” he says.

\--

Nicholas Harper in the corner of the room, twisting a black cap in his hands as he looks out of the window. “A pity, isn’t it?”

He, Loki, doesn’t look up. He has spent the morning hunched over the latest maps – latest, in these parts, means five years old; lakes have probably dried, entire mountains shifted. The forests have probably put out their roots and, taking great, gnarled handfuls of the crumbling earth, hauled themselves elsewhere.

“What’s a pity?” he says. Then: “Give me an estimate, won’t you. Two months, or three?”

“Best stick to three. But you’ll probably call me back before the year is out.”

“We take better care of our windows than that, I should think.”

Harper laughs. “I don’t mean that. Haven’t you heard? The Queen miscarried her child. Word in the court is that it was a boy, or at least old enough to look like one.” 

Word in the court is, that the child was also deformed. It had a tail, which was covered in fur. It had a full mouth of teeth. There were six fingers on its right hand. But these are all old accusations; they were made against Anne herself, and then the Princess Elizabeth. If you are going to invent things, he thinks, show a little ingenuity. Don’t play the same trick twice. 

When the King set aside Katherine of Aragon – his wife of twenty years – for Anne Boleyn, the promise had been there: choose me, and I will bear you a son. Three years later, and it has not happened.

Down in the yard, a stable-boy is dragging his feet on the gravel. He shuffles the maps.

“It would’ve been better for her if Katherine were still alive.”

“I could always,” Harper puts in thoughtfully, “leave an empty space where the panther should go. Then, if Henry sets her aside, we can put in another emblem.”

“Thor won’t settle for that. He’ll think it’s treason.”

“Oh, Thor won’t have time to squabble over windows. He’ll be too busy managing his estates.”

“Thor doesn’t know how to manage an estate.” He starts to roll the map up, looking absently around for the ribbon. “I am thinking of moving the household over to Boughton, until the repairs are over. But I’m not sure what the roads are like at this time of the year.”

“Full of holes.” Harper stands, jams the cap back onto his head. “Don’t take your best furniture.”

\--

He is coming out of the stables, still in his gloves, nearly runs into Thor before he’s gone two paces.

Thor looks like he’s been sitting in the straw for hours. There are grass stains on his doublet. How on earth he got those, unless he went skidding through the common on his stomach, is a mystery.

He says without slowing: “Have you been tumbling girls in the heather again?”

“What?”

Never mind. “The Talbots have sent me a letter. They are – ”

“Loki.” Thor stops him with a broad hand on the shoulder, drags at him stubbornly until he checks his pace. “Is everything alright?”

“Of course. The preparations for the funeral will be finalized in a few days.”

“That isn’t – ”

He can read the look in Thor’s face. It is a look heavy enough to sink a galleon. He can feel the surge of something into his ribcage, his lungs growing tighter, as if to squeeze his heart up and out of his throat. It is not a new feeling: there are still some mornings when he wakes with a longing so complete it is like being racked, though he had thought, I have tamped that down. I have put it behind me. I have tucked it into my palm and closed my fist on it.

He realizes suddenly: I am afraid. You can say, the smoke got to my head – the flame, the fear of dying, it overwhelmed me, in that moment – but there is no fire here. There is no way out.

“Thor,” he says at last, quietly. “Let go of me.”

“Can we not at least speak about this?”

“No.” He puts a hand on Thor’s chest, pushes at him firmly in the way you would push at a rusty door. “I have gotten a letter. The King calls you to court as the Sixth Earl of Huxley, so you have work to do, or else all the other nobles will take huge bites out of your borders. Your creditors will be looking for ways to wheedle your manors away. Your tenants, they will be trying to take advantage of you. _That_ is what you should be thinking of, not – ” Damn it to Hell, he is thinking; I cannot look him in the face. “That is the price for being what you are.”

Thor makes an impatient gesture. “I will deal with all of those things in time.”

“Will you? Do you even know what income your manors bring in? Your expenditure?”

“No.” Thor looks frustrated, like he is being difficult on purpose. “But I do not see how it matters. You have always been familiar with those things, and these last few years – ”

“You cannot take it for granted that I will stay with you.”

“But why would you not?”

It is just like Thor, to be surprised at such a thing. Thor has never had to fight, to set himself against the rest of the world; survival is not a concept that Thor understands. He turns away. 

“Now that Odin is dead,” he says, “I am not bound to this house anymore. I can leave whenever I wish.”

“But you are needed here,” Thor says. He feels Thor reach for him and he flinches away, alarmed. “Loki, I cannot guess at your mind, but if you are thinking to leave because of what occurred that night – I do not hold it against you, what you did. I know you did not mean it.”

“No.”

“I do not wish it to be what drives you away. It is easily forgotten.”

So kind of you. Thor, with his noble blood, finds it within his infinite magnanimity to forgive. God could not be more generous. The snarl wrestles its way out from between his teeth before he knows it: he is pulling away, blood hot, his heartbeat in his ears, the gravel scattering underfoot; he is pushing his way towards the house like a man drowning.

\--

March. The New Year. A letter from Margaret: When are you coming home, husband? Henry said his first word yesterday.

In Southampton, the house is in an uproar. He writes this to her, in his open, unaffected hand – it is a thing Odin taught him, to give the appearance of ease when there is none. They are packing things up in maple trunks lined with cambric, with pine chips to keep the moths out. They are saddling up the horses. They are scrubbing out the stockpots and loading them up on carts. 

Nicholas Harper has sent a letter: How on earth am I to work in these conditions? Everybody rushing about, all the brick men getting under my feet? At this rate we won’t be done until Michaelmas.

Little Honor Middleton is getting married and she wants her dowry. Patrick, the boy who brings in the kindling and scuttles about in the mornings putting bellows to fire, has broken his arm falling down a flight of stairs. When he lies in his bed at night, alone, these are the things that come to him – these are the things that keep him awake, nibbling at the edges of his sleep. Richard and Thomas are quarrelling; Richard Lakely, that is, not the Richard he keeps in the counting house. Yesterday there was a brawl and Thomas lost some teeth. Throckton, one of the tenants on the land Thor holds to the west, is complaining that sheep – he doesn’t know who they belong to, but damn if he wouldn’t like to know – keep wandering onto his property and trampling down his fence.

Richard says, master, you are working yourself to the bone – shouldn’t you go to bed? But he doesn’t mind it. When he is thinking about dowries and brawls and sheep, he is not thinking about Thor.

He writes to Margaret, carefully: I cannot come home just yet. 

Now Richard peeks in around the doorjamb. “Master, how much longer will we be staying at court?”

“A little while.”

“And then we will go to Boughton, with the rest of the house?”

“Perhaps. If business doesn’t keep us away.”

The Talbots are offering up their youngest, Anne, in marriage. The dowry alone would be enough to sway a lesser man. He says to Richard, is it bad form, do you think, to have a wedding so soon after a funeral? But Richard is flipping through the stack of papers waiting to be filed and so misses the question.

“We are getting an awful lot of visitors,” Richard says. He sounds plaintive. “And an awful lot of letters.”

“And I have to answer them all. You would not want to be in my place.”

“But they do not write to Thor – I mean, to the Earl. They write to you. Why is that?”

Does Thor ever answer his letters? It is like writing to a brick wall. He doesn’t say this. He puts his quill down, shakes out the cramp from his fingers. His thumb is blotched with ink.

“The Duke of Norfolk’s servant,” Richard says, “he approached me today, he asked me about you. He wanted to know about your ancestors.” Richard looks at him dubiously from under close-cropped hair. “Do you _have_ any ancestors?”

“I had a mother and a father, if that’s what you mean.”

“Everybody is always asking me and asking me. They never used to ask me before.”

“Perhaps they find that you are looking more intelligent nowadays. Though I haven’t noticed any difference, personally.” He reaches out a hand – Richard passes him the next letter to be opened, a smooth, methodical movement. The two of them could do this in their sleep. “The Duke of Norfolk probably wants use of my banking connections. Warwick too.”

“Suffolk?”

“Lord knows what Suffolk wants. Somebody else’s wife, most likely.”

Richard looks curious. “Can you do that? Get him someone else’s wife?”

A man like Suffolk, he probably has everyone’s wives already. They just don’t know it yet. He’s seen the Duke at the King’s New Year court – a broad, square man, with a fussy beard and a set of naturally sentimental eyes that he uses to his advantage with the women. 

He places his knife underneath the edge of the seal, pries it off the envelope with a neat swipe.

“You’ve been with me for two years, Richard,” he says. “You should know that I can do anything.”

\--

Norfolk himself barrels in one morning, leaving a trail of flustered clerks in his wake.

“ _You_ ,” Norfolk says. The senior nobleman in the realm, the Duke of Norfolk looks like a bone that some errant dog has chewed on, and then discarded – there is a bristling air about him, and the skin on his aged self is as tough as old leather. “You’re the one they’re all talking about, eh? The new Thomas Cromwell? Not that we need another one, the first is enough trouble on his own.”

Richard trickles in looking dismayed. “I’m sorry, master, I was about to warn you – ”

“Warn him! What, of me? What did you think I came here to do, bite his head off?”

He, Loki, thinks: Richard, you are always two steps behind. Whatever am I going to do with you? And then he looks at the Duke and thinks, if you were to bite my head off I don’t think I would be in the least bit surprised. 

“Unfortunately,” he says, “the Earl is not here at the moment.”

“What’s that to me? If I wanted to see Huxley I’d rout him out of a hayloft somewhere. Word around court is that that’s where he takes his women. Wine,” he barks at Richard, who goes backing out immediately like a kicked animal. “Nice rooms you have here. You have a wife?”

Jesu Maria. “Yes, my lord. Will you not sit?”

“Hate sitting. Bad for my joints. Huxley hasn’t presented you yet, has he?”

“To the King? No.”

Norfolk laughs. “Ashamed, is he? Ashamed that you’re the one doing all his dirty work? The man doesn’t appreciate you, that’s what I say.”

A retort bubbles up to his lips – then he swallows it down. You don’t talk back to the Duke of Norfolk. Nobody knows the Duke’s real age, but he puts it at around seventy; either that, or ninety.

“How is your,” he starts, then rephrases. “I hope your niece the Queen is well.”

“Oh, I can’t control her.” Norfolk flaps a hand.

“I was sorry to hear – ”

“Don’t start on that business, I don’t want to hear it. She won’t listen to me, she won’t take my counsel, and soon she’ll pay the price. I’m not here to talk about her and her dead children.” The Duke has been busy inspecting all the items on his desk; now he straightens, puts his grizzled fingers flat on the wood as if to make the point: master Loki, we are being serious now. “How would you like a place in the House of Commons, hmm? Before they sit again after the New Year? You’ve studied the law, it would be a natural step up for you.”

“I really haven’t thought about it before,” he lies.

“Nonsense. Don’t take me for a child. We’re a different breed to Huxley and Suffolk – those two don’t know an advantage when it’s standing naked in front of them. You though, you’ve got eyes.”

He can’t help his smile. “I should hope so, my lord.”

“So it’s settled then?”

“If your lordship will permit me, I shall think on it.”

Norfolk strikes the table impatiently, just as Richard comes in with the wine. “Think on it? By St Jude, what do you need to think on it for? I’d bet you ten pounds Huxley couldn’t do better for you.”

“I am comfortable in his service. He treats me well. He is like a brother to me.”

“What on earth would you want a brother for, that’s what I’d like to know. More likely to murder you in your sleep than anything else.” The Duke sniffs. “Still, it is good that you are loyal. That is something to admire in a man, I suppose.”

Norfolk says it as if it were squeezed out of him by an iron press: _I suppose_.

He begins to say, you do me too much honour, but then Richard edges forward with the tray.

“Oh,” Norfolk snaps. The grizzled hand comes up; he swats Richard away in irritation. “I don’t want any wine _now_ , boy. I thought I’d be dead in my grave before you got back with some. I’m on my way out.”

“Richard, ask Edward to fetch the Duke’s horses.”

“I’m – yes.”

The Duke, in his grave? You couldn’t bury Norfolk; he’d come clawing back out of the dirt, eyebrows pinched, demanding every last shilling you owe him. He’d chase you down the street in his shroud. He’d go through your house, banging all the drawers shut, rattling your teeth. Norfolk’s no fool. The King of England doesn’t run the country – money does.

\--

The cup, when he goes in, has been placed upright on the table.

Thor is circling it with a frown on his face. Inspecting it from all angles. “Loki, do you think – ”

Do you think it is suitable, is what Thor means. Will the King like it. The King is so changeable nowadays, it is hard to know what he would like or not like; still, you wouldn’t want to give offence. Not at New Year. 

The gold chain on Thor’s shoulders is set with garnets the size of pebbles and it slaps against his chest every time he makes a sharp, anxious swivel on the floorboards. 

He, Loki, obligingly approaches the table. “May I?”

“What? Oh, pick it up if you like. I’ll have it polished again before I send it anyway.”

He turns the cup over in his fingers. Out of the corner of his eye, he is still watching Thor pace about fretfully – it is like watching a stag that knows it has hounds on its tail. “Where did you get this?”

“I hardly know,” Thor says. 

“That won’t do.”

“Never mind where I got it from. Will he like it?”

“The craftsmanship is not very good.” He points to a spot where, having misjudged the distance, two Tudor roses at the base of Anne’s falcon badge have been mashed together.

Thor leans in, a swoop like a bird, and groans. “Is it that noticeable?”

“You can always turn the cup on its cushion so that this side is hidden. He won’t look too closely.”

“But the defect is still there.” Thor swears, vehement. The garnets flash angrily. “I should never have commissioned it. I am no judge of these things.”

“You should’ve asked me first.”

“I am always asking you first!”

He is unprepared for the outburst. It breaks over his shoulder like a cresting wave, knocks him off-balance. Thor very rarely raises his voice – but when he does, it is as if a cannon has gone off indoors and blasted the ceiling clean off the walls.

“I am always,” Thor continues, “I am always having to ask for your permission. For your advice. You are not – _I_ am the Earl of Huxley, I am master of my own house, and I don’t need your agreement before I order something to be done. People pass me over because they don’t think I’m able to attend to my own affairs, but I _am_. I am my father’s son. Who are you?” Thor’s hand is gripping the table with white knuckles. “You are nobody, Loki. You are not even – ”

He is not going to listen to the rest of this. He is halfway to the door before Thor catches up to him, gets a firm grip on his doublet and spins him roughly around.

“All I seem to hear is that I can’t do without you. I write to my household – I say I want you all at Hester, and they say, oh, but Loki has said that we must all go to Boughton. My bankers will only take terms from _you_. My own people cut across my way when I try to work out how much coin I have – ”

“I will write to your bankers,” he says, coldly. “If you do not want my advice, I can easily cease to give it.”

“No, Loki, that is not what I _mean_.” 

Thor’s hand slides over his shoulder and fists itself into the hair at the base of his nape. He braces for impact; he thinks that Thor is going to shake him. But Thor is only holding him in place, bringing their foreheads together, as if a ghost had whispered into the room and told them to pray for their souls.

“Do you not see,” Thor says at last, “that I am afraid?”

“You cannot be afraid of me. As you said yourself, my lord, I am nobody of consequence.”

Thor flinches like he’s been whipped. “Loki, I’m not your lord.”

“Aren’t you?”

Thor kisses him hard, puts two hands on either side of his jaw and holds him there.

He breaks away. At first he doesn’t know what is happening – he can still taste Thor in his mouth, and there is a sharp spike of pain where Thor’s teeth collided with his through the flesh of his lip – he has somehow clenched a hand into the fabric of Thor’s jacket. He is gripping tight enough to tear the seams. New velvet that they had shipped in specially from Portugal, and here he is, shredding it. Thor kisses him again, biting into his mouth; he forgets about the jacket; his nails catch against Thor’s garnets; he is somehow pressed up against a wall, but he doesn’t remember taking any steps back to get there.

Enough. Something twists inside his belly, something panicked and deadly. Enough. He puts a hand to Thor’s wrist, applies a steady pressure until Thor’s hold gives way.

“You can’t go, Loki, I won’t permit you to leave, you are – you are in my employment, and I tell you – ”

His limbs are trembling but at the door he turns. He gives Thor a curt bow. People forget that he was brought up a banker, a lawyer, a writer of slippery clauses; tell him something and he’ll find a way to turn the words back on themselves. He’ll feed them back to you, and you won’t recognize them. 

Tell him that he can’t do something and he will say, my lord: you do not know who I am.

\--

_Astrology_  
November, 1536: Stonegate

The Duke of Warwick: squat and stout, with a heavy-set chin and a brutish energy from the crown of his head to his club-like boots. His eyes are narrow, flat, and blue. Gems bristle on his fingers but he spends so much time with his fists clenched that you’d think they were spikes sitting on his knuckles; you expect one to swing into your eye on a dark night, to lay you out flat in the yard.

“Loki!” The Duke rounds the corner, boots punching the floorboards. “What is the meaning of this?”

Warwick has a letter throttled in one hand. He, Loki, rises from his desk, craning surreptitiously to catch a glimpse of _which_ letter – he has penned thousands.

“My lord?” he says.

Warwick throws the paper onto the table. “Have you been procuring Florentine silks for my wife?”

“The Duchess requested – ”

Richard, with his gift for unfortunate timing, comes swooping in with the latest batch of papers: this lease or that, this amendment or other, letters from scholars on the continent, records of the ships coming in and out of the ports. “Loki, I’ve managed to dig up the account-books for you – ”

“Are you prying into my private accounts?” the Duke shouts. “Have you been poking about my personal business? I tell you, it is my decision whether or not the Duchess has silks or rags, and I say – ”

Richard stops three steps into the room, aghast.

The Duchess bustles in looking harried: “Edward, for God’s sake, stop all this noise.”

“Aha! Here it is, my twenty-three pounds!” Warwick pinches her sleeve between two fingers, triumphant, yanking it up into the light. “What are you going about court dressed like this for? You are too old for yellow. It makes you look doughy, lady wife, you should stick to blue.”

He thinks, the Lord save us from Edward Nevill, who cannot get out of bed without raising half the country with him. In the mornings the Duke stumps about his rooms in a fury: Why is it raining? Why is the cold not yet improved? Where is my wife? The grey-lined beard prickling with indignation, the damp joints snapping. Where is my mistress? What, called back to court! Again! 

“My lord,” he says, “if I may speak with you in private.”

“You may not!” And then, thinking better of it – “Everybody, out!”

Richard, out of the corner of his eye, scurries away in relief.

He lays the truth out in terms even the Duke can understand. The fact of the matter is, the Duchess has become aware of a certain lady. This lady is young. This lady is, by all accounts, very beautiful. This lady is engaged to be married after the New Year, but there is a painting of her hung in my lord’s bedchamber.

Warwick huffs. “There is nothing indecent about the picture. She is fully clothed.”

“All the same, I thought it best to make the Duchess a gift. To soothe any feathers that may be ruffled in the near future. She has wanted the silks for a while now.”

“But, twenty-three pounds!”

Warwick goes stamping out of the room, but at least he goes without shouting.

In the North, for two months, half the country has been thrown into chaos. October: Lincolnshire takes up her pitchforks, her cleavers and her scythes, her sharpest spitting skewers, every piece of farming equipment with an edge, and storms south. Yorkshire follows. Why? Some idiot has gone about spreading the rumour that the parish churches will be torn down along with the abbeys; that the King will have all the gold in the country collected into a giant pile and carted away on mules; that, in future, no-one will be allowed to eat pork, or white bread, or capons, without first obtaining a licence.

Only in the North, he thinks. Why capons, specifically? Why not a duck?

He can still see the Duke of Warwick planted in the middle of the room: _Twenty-three pounds!_

By the time Richard comes inching back in, it is nearly mid-afternoon. The sun falls through the window. Squares of gold, pale and shifting, shuffle like penitent children across the floorboards. 

The morning he’d left Southampton Castle for the last time – before the New Year – had been slow, dusky, the light inching in shards over his gloves. He’d listened to Richard clambering up onto a horse. The jingle of bit and tack. The long shadow of the house had made him jittery, as if he’d half expected it to pick itself up from the ground and start chasing him. He’d looked back before they’d ridden – the stilted view of the castle from below, the sky behind it, the pretty brickwork that would not sustain a single blast from a cannon – the scooped-out hollow, like a gaping maw, where the fire had been. 

Richard is shuffling a stack of papers: “You have another letter from my lord Thor.”

“No need to answer it,” he says. Did Harper ever manage to get the windows in? “But put it on file.”

\--

He rides to London to see Margaret. He is caught in a rainstorm and arrives half-drowned, the wool sticking to him, trying to drag him down into the muck.

“You’re mad,” she tells him. She pulls and pushes him by intervals. Finally she succeeds in positioning him in front of the fireplace, where he stands and drips. “Look at you. I haven’t any idea whether I want to slap you or kiss you.” She bundles a towel into his arms. “You rode alone?”

Her dark eyes shine in the light, so he catches her wrist and kisses her gently. “Yes.”

“All the way from Stonegate? You’re lucky you weren’t set upon by robbers.”

“Or by a band of monks.”

“ _Husband_ ,” she says.

He sees with some surprise that she is genuinely worried. “Oh, you know me,” he says. “I would’ve talked them out of it. I would’ve drawn up a contract and made them sign.”

“Talk, talk, talk,” she says. He lets her peel off his coat. “At least you’re good at that.”

“How are our children?”

“Henry is well, but you should see Richard’s Latin. It’s atrocious.”

He ponders this for a moment. “Perhaps we should find him another tutor.”

“Perhaps you should come home more often.”

This is what he likes about Margaret. Her palms skate up his bare chest, and then she tangles her fingers into the damp hair at the base of his neck. When Margaret wants something she says it flatly and plainly; it is so plain that it leaves a metallic taste in your mouth, like a coin fresh off the mint.

“What have you been doing while I’ve been away?” he asks her softly, pulling her closer.

She settles into him. “Arranging loans. Making money.”

“You’re lucky I’m not a lord, or I’d have to pen you into the house and force you to embroider all day.”

“You couldn’t pen me anywhere, you brute.”

It is so late that the household is already asleep. Steam rises up from his wet clothes. 

She is deceptively small in his arms, her breasts pressed against his chest. 

He can’t remember why he rode to see her but only that it came over him like a fever. Somewhere in the chaos of Stonegate, a part of him had called out for home; her eyes, perhaps, or the dark slide of her hair down over her shoulder. Her nimble, malleable smile. 

She is swaying against him, half-asleep. “How long can you stay? I can’t wake any of the children now, so if you want to see them you’ll have to stay at least for the night.”

“Mmm.”

They drift upstairs. Water-logged, his lawyer’s clothes have started to resemble the wings of a bat. By the morning the wool will have dried; he will emerge from his bedchamber black and freshly plumed; little Richard, stumbling over his Latin verbs, will put a wondering hand into the jet-coloured fabric and say, Who are you mourning, father? Who is dead?

\--

The new kitchen boy, Peter, looking on suspiciously with wiry arms crossed over his chest.

He is out of his lawyer’s robes and in a loose-fitting shirt. It is nearly Christmas but they are standing so close to the fire it barely matters. He is pointing out how the cleaver here, this one you are using to split the bones? It isn’t heavy enough. You’re not cutting through them cleanly – you’re splintering them. One of these days the Duke will choke on a shard of bone and then we’ll never hear the end of it.

“We never hear the end of it as it is,” Peter grumbles, reluctantly taking the cleaver back. “I swear, one morning soon – ” He makes a violent swing with the blade. “Begging your pardon.”

He’s more amused than anything. “Tell me again, how long have you been in this house?”

“Two months, by the end of this week.”

Someone throws the kitchen door open with a clatter: “Loki, the Duke wants you upstairs!”

The Duke wants a man who is capable of being in five places at once. He wipes the sweat off his neck, catches Peter scowling at the rack of venison on the board like he hates it. 

He thinks, that was me, once. But now I know better. 

He claps the boy on the shoulder, friendly as you please. “I know you hate him but I need him to sign some papers for me tonight, so don’t poison him just yet, there’s a good lad.”

“I wouldn’t need to lift a finger,” Peter says. “The Duchess would get to him first.”

“Even so.”

In the lower halls there is a mad dash of activity. Plays are being rehearsed, decorations hung, children are being ordered to and fro with towels and basins of hot water. Two days ago Warwick had clomped aggressively down from his ivory tower and roared something about the paint peeling off his coat of arms. He, Loki, had made a slight bow. “Shall I take the chance to remove the late Queen’s arms from over the doorway and replace them with the Queen Jane’s?” Warwick had looked at him as if he’d suggested we all take off our clothes and run through the London streets naked. “Never mind.”

All the same, Anne’s falcon is being painted out. Jane Seymour’s phoenix, golden wings spread and perched on the turrets of a castle, a new beginning, a rebirth, will soon supplant it.

Amidst the chaos, Richard catches him by the elbow. “There are monks at the door.”

“What?” he says, distracted. Richard is puffing and there is a splotch of ink under his jawbone. A girl costumed as Liberty hurries past, one hand clutching at her wig. “Where is the Duke?”

“What do you want me to do with the monks?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “Feed them, I suppose.”

“If we feed them they’ll come back!” Richard reels away down the corridor, hands thrown up in exasperation. “Thomas, watch where you’re going with those candlesticks!”

The Duchess’ little dogs are getting in everyone’s way. Panting, snuffling, they are twisting underfoot and whipping at people’s calves with their tails. The Duke is in his cabinet – it is a cool, secluded room, with an air of peace, but the illusion is invariably shattered the moment Warwick opens his mouth: 

“Fifty pounds!”

Oh, what now. He stands in the doorway fighting off a headache. “I’m afraid I don’t – ”

“Who are you bringing in to paint our walls? Michelangelo?”

“Michelangelo is in Rome painting a fresco for the Pope.”

Warwick thunders over with a pinched expression. “Don’t be coy with me, I won’t have it. I’ve heard about you arranging loans for Norfolk. As if the Howard family needs any more gold!”

“The Duke had need of my services. And he paid me handsomely for them.”

“Don’t _I_ pay you?”

Not enough for someone you can’t do without; but then Warwick knows that already. He wants to say, I’m not here for your hospitality. I’m here to make friends. I’m here to find my footholds, so that next time when I reach out with my hand above my head, I will find a neat little rung there to help me up. 

Warwick is watching him, beady eyes narrowed in consideration. “Anyone else?”

“Besides the Duke of Norfolk? No.” Not yet.

“Good.” The Duke sniffs and stumps back towards the window. “How are the Christmas preparations coming along? Aside from the painting.”

“Very nicely, my lord.”

“You’ll speak to the painter.”

He inclines his head. Whatever you say.

“Can they spare you for two days? I need you to take care of something.”

Down in the courtyard two boys are trying to drag a dog back into its cage. It is one of Warwick’s hounds gone wild. Its flanks are thin and bony. Perhaps there has been some negligence – in winter the hounds should be properly fed; only in summer, in preparation for the oncoming hunt, should they be starved.

Warwick waves him towards the desk. He thinks, hungry dogs should either be fed or killed. Killed is better, because a thing once wild will be wild forever; it will turn on you when you least expect it, and then you will find suddenly that its teeth have sunken into your hand.

\--

Boughton. Morning. He is trying to put a calm expression on his face, a cool detachment, but his insides are trembling slightly as Thor flips through pages.

“My debts,” Thor says at last, slowly. “You are calling them in?”

The room is closeted and musty. The windows looking out to the gardens are closed. The entire North hangs in the balance but here it’s business as usual. Thin sunlight, the colour of lemon peel, stretches tentative fingers along the sill – which, he sees, holds a thick layer of dust like a blanket of down. 

“Yes,” he says. “My lord has urgent need of the money.”

Thor puts the papers back. “You must know that I cannot pay them. The income from my lands, my manors, they are already being fed into debts to the Florentine banks.”

“The Lady Anne’s dowry was of five hundred pounds.”

“It is gone already.”

A part of him is saying, you expected this. He folds his fingers neatly. “Gone where? The last time I had sight of your books, you were in comfortable profit. And you always used to assure me that you were capable of managing your own affairs, otherwise I would never have left you.” 

Thor looks miserable, his large hands resting limply on the desk. “Why did he send you, Loki?”

“Warwick always sends me. To everywhere. To everyone.”

“You did not answer any of my letters.”

“Perhaps if you had spent less time writing letters, and more time looking after your inheritance – ”

“Please, Loki.” Thor’s voice is tired. “There is no need for you to be cruel.”

His fingers clench. Carefully, he forces himself to look away; Boughton is a cramped sort of house so this is not as easy as it sounds. On the day of the wedding Thor had sought him out, wrapped up in his wedding finery of blues and greens, crimson silks. They’d stood by in silence and watched Anne Talbot dance, diamonds flitting in her hair. 

They’d let it rest for that day. I was not born cruel, he thinks – but then, Thor, you know that.

“You are doing well for yourself,” Thor says finally. “You’ve bought another house in the country?”

“Margaret enjoys the country.”

“I don’t know what Anne enjoys,” Thor confesses, staring down at his hands. “She barely speaks to me.”

“Perhaps she is preoccupied with her father’s safety.” 

“You mean the situation in Lincolnshire?” For a moment they sit together and picture the Earl of Shrewsbury, stuck uselessly with a tiny knot of troops somewhere near Louth. Scowling through the piddling rain, and roasting rabbits for breakfast. Thor shakes his head. “It isn’t that.”

“She is still without child?” 

“Yes. We sleep separately now. As she is so – young. I know you’d say that sixteen is not young, but I am afraid to touch her.”

“Anne Howard was fourteen when she married Richmond. And Suffolk’s wife, fourteen also.”

“Loki,” Thor says.

Somehow they have blundered themselves into dangerous territory; this is not what he wants to talk about. “Warwick will give you a month at the most.”

“A month will change nothing of my situation, you know that.”

“But a month is still time.”

Thor stays silent.

He finds himself looking down at the grooves between his knuckles. He is wearing a garnet that Margaret gave him. It is the size of his thumbnail, and in the shape of a heart. When she had been pregnant with Richard, she’d called upon an astrologer to predict the sex of the child, but now he knows that nothing in England is certain: the borders surge and retreat, the rivers remake themselves. 

What are the astrologers of the court saying now? Mercury on the rise, that fickle and silver-tongued planet; he gets up. He pushes his chair away. He resists the urge to dust off his hands.

\--

Richard, his Richard, coming in from the yard with a skinned knee.

Henry totters in after. He is proud of his children – they do not cry easily. It takes a heavy fall or a sting from a wasp for either of them to start wailing.

“Richard?” Margaret comes downstairs fixing her cap. “Did one of the other boys knock you down?”

“I knocked _him_ down,” Richard says.

Henry grabs hold of Margaret’s skirts, a little resolute fist: “Mama, mama, mama – ”

He scoops Henry up. He does not remember Richard being so heavy at this age, but then Richard has always been small; the doctors, hovering nervously by, had fretted at his birth that he would not live a month. But here Richard is, skinned knee and all. 

He bobs Henry against his hip. “Shall I put him to bed?”

Margaret looks over at him, raising an eyebrow. “We have women to do that, you know.”

“Where _is_ Elizabeth?”

He carries Henry up the stairs, listening to the house. Over the months he has learned to tell places apart by the sounds they make. Stonegate: always some minor crisis or other – perhaps the Duke has been thrown off his horse, or a maid has been caught out palming the silver, or the King is coming, or the sky is about to cave in, Heaven help us all. Southampton: the whisper of the orchards, the soft patter of rain against the roof of the stables, Thor careening around the corners – Father has given us his permission, we are going to Rome! What do you mean, what for? Because it’s _Rome_!

He is stroking a hand gently over Henry’s head when Margaret comes up. Together they peer down into the cot. Henry’s hair is so pale it is as if he has a halo; where did he get that from? Not me, surely.

“Already,” Margaret says, smilingly, “they are inseparable.”

“Indeed.”

“Have you been to see Thor?”

He twirls a lock of Henry’s hair in between his fingers. “I’ll get the money back. Even if I have to break his estates to do it.” Henry gurgles on the cot. “You know the King still hasn’t an heir? While we have two. It seems harsh, after all the trouble he’s gone to.”

“The King forgets that he can’t order up a son like you’d order up a partridge for supper.”

“Is that what we’re having?”

“How should I know?” She straightens up beside him, distracted, and slides a soft hand over his shoulder. “Is it true, that Huxley is destitute? I can barely believe it.”

“I’m surprised it wasn’t you who drew up his loans.”

She laughs. “And expect Thor to pay them? I’d want a better hope of return. His debts will be outstanding long after the coming of Christ.”

“True.”

“You must help him, Loki.”

A shaft of sunlight falls across Henry’s brow. He is surprised. “Must?”

“He’s as good as your brother,” she says. “You cannot throw him to the wolves.”

“Meg, I work for Warwick now.”

“It isn’t a matter of who you work for. Norfolk and Warwick, they’re in your pocket at the moment, but they’ll kick you into the road at the first chance they get. They don’t like the idea of you. They don’t like new men. They’re doing all they can now to bring Thomas Cromwell down, and they were the ones who raised him up in the first place.”

“You’re mistaken if you think that Thor will back me, he rarely goes to court himself.”

“He’d go if you wanted him to.”

“He’s no courtier. They’d carve him up and roast him. They’d serve him up for supper.”

She dips a finger into his collar and tugs it. “And you think they wouldn’t do the same to you? Thor would do anything for you if you asked him. Trust me on it, husband.”

Henry is fast asleep. Richard comes hurtling up the stairs, limping a little from the scrape. There are soft flecks of snow on his son’s shoulders; Margaret leans over to wipe them off. For the briefest moment he thinks of blood and of what it signifies. In the frozen earth somewhere, in a marsh, or a bog, or the bottom of the Thames, his own father’s bones are encased; where, perhaps at night, they stir and rattle and claw out of the soil.

“Is he sleeping?” Richard asks. He watches his son lean over the cot. The skinned knee forgotten. On the thin little face there is an entranced, open look, like a fresh piece of parchment waiting for ink.

\--

He is surprised when Peter comes clattering in, stinking of horse sweat. “What are you – ”

“Warwick kicked me out.” Peter swipes a hand over his top lip – it’s an innocent motion, but made with the aggression of an executioner. “Choked on a fishbone. Any chopping to be done here?”

He sizes Peter up, carefully. “Ever been on the wrong side of the law?”

The boy shrugs. “Possibly.”

All night he’d dreamed of betrayal. First he had seen Margaret, with her belly swollen and her hand on Richard’s scruffy head, going over the books with a fresh quill and a calculating expression. Then Thor, in the saddle and looking back, eyes dark. _He would do anything for you_. He’d woken sweat-drenched, swearing, with the remembered taste of Thor’s kiss in his mouth; he’d leaned over the side of the bed and promptly vomited.

“I could have uses for you,” he says now, circling slowly. “I have an interest in the Earl of Huxley. He owes my lord money.”

“You want the Earl dead?” Peter says.

Jesu Maria. He takes Peter’s upper arm into an iron grip. “No. That is not what I said. I said I have an interest. I want you to put an apron on. I want you to keep your head down and tell me everything that happens in that house. Do you understand me?”

Peter nods, ponderously. “Dead men can’t make good on their debts. I get it.”

“I’m not just interested in where the money goes. I want to know everything. Guests. Visitors. The servants, what they wear and what they do.” Money has gone missing there, he thinks – some stable-hand’s whore is wearing Frigga’s jewels, pinned in a corset over her slack breasts. “Can you write?”

“Some. Not much. I can read, though, read the Bible. Tyndale.”

“Can you count? Add and subtract?”

“I can learn,” Peter says, looking a little dubious.

Never mind. Richard can add and subtract, that is good enough. He puts a coin into Peter’s palm, slaps him on the shoulder, puts him back out on the road. 

On Thor’s wedding day, the weather had been chill but fine, a snaking mist in the early morning that had dissolved by noon into moist whispers. Pavilions had been erected on the lawns. Silk flags fluttered about in the breeze; the dew glittered. He’d ridden over from Stonegate without any breakfast and the smell of roast meat made him sway, nauseous. A girl in a brocade dress drifted past: “Dance, _monsieur_?”

“I want the terms of the lease,” he says to Richard, who is still yawning over the morning’s accounts. “I want something I can work with.” He hesitates. “And the letters, on file, the – ”

What on earth is he doing?

He goes out into the cold, icy afternoon, where Christmas is inching forward on stocking feet.

He’d felt Thor beside him like you’d feel a ghost. The wide, solid bulk of the shoulders; the gentleman’s hands, smooth and unblemished, but large enough to pin him down with ease. The want had gone through him like a shiver. Then, bleached by the sunlight, he’d tucked it back into his ribs.

“You are lucky,” he’d said, looking out at Anne Talbot.

“Am I?”

“Look.” He’d jerked his chin. Anne was dancing now with her brother, her pretty face flushed from the exertion and the heat. “The men are all staring after her.”

“Yes,” Thor had said.

Now, in Stonegate, he goes back inside. He sifts through this and that. He thinks of other things. Centuries ago, a King of England married a beautiful woman named Melusine; but on Saturdays, the lower half of her body changed into the cold and slippery scales of a snake. 

He imagines Peter bent over his horse, riding over the rickety roads and against the wind.

\--

Come to supper, the letter says. Dated September. He turns it over to see if there’s anything scribbled on the back: Come to supper, but bring your own wine? Your own cook?

Peter is sitting on the edge of his desk munching an apple. “You should see the beef. The colour of grit. They can only get away with serving it salted to within an inch of its life.” A decisive snapping sound as he tears a chunk of fruit off with his teeth. “And the eggs – ”

“Well, whatever happens, we can’t have the Earl done to death by his own supper.”

Richard sticks his head in. “Tarts, Loki.”

“Suffolk?”

“Huxley. I mean, Thor.”

Peter snags one off the incoming tray: “Is he trying to pay his debts off with these? They’re better than anything I ever saw while I was in their kitchen.”

“It’s the giving season, Peter.” He is busy reading another letter, this one from late October; some rain has gotten onto it and the ink is smudged illegibly along one side like a ruined cobweb. “I want a horse.”

“Me?”

“No. Richard.”

“Yes, Your Holiness,” Richard says; then, alarmed by his own boldness, whisks away.

They are saying that in London the Thames has frozen over. Good. Warwick won’t be coming back by barge any time soon, and for each day that the Duke is off somewhere else, shouting at the pages, bullying his way through the King’s Christmas court, buying jewels that he can’t afford for the Queen’s waiting women, is another day of Paradise. 

Downstairs there is a crash and then some drunken singing. _An-ge-lus ad Vir-gi-nem_ – 

“Lady Huxley,” Peter says. “She looks as sweet as honey, but she has a tongue like a whip.”

\--

He’s seen Anne Talbot once before in Boughton – sleeves edged with marmoset, whispering down the great staircase in small, precise steps. Dance, _monsieur_? Now her mouth, which is a little too large for the current fashion, is pressed together as if she’s sitting for a Holbein portrait and trying to show herself in the best light; an emerald is nestled under her throat.

The fire in the grate splutters. Thor gets up, gives it an embarrassed kick with his boot. “Cold, isn’t it?”

“What are you suggesting we do?” Anne says, in a tone like the weather.

“Show me your books. I can better advise you that way.”

“I’m sure that would be to your advantage,” she says, “to know how large a piece you can carve from us before you serve us up to your Duke.” 

Abruptly he remembers: this is a Talbot girl, sixteen years in the frozen Shrewsbury North with Scots stamping on the border every month. You can talk all you like, Margaret had said. But one of these days, Loki, you’ll come up against someone you can’t talk around, and then you’ll see.

He spreads his hands. “Believe me, madam, I have no such designs. Your good husband is my brother.”

“Then persuade Warwick to let us be.”

“I’m afraid that is impossible.”

“You’ve managed more difficult missions in the past,” she says, matter-of-fact. “You have, for instance, persuaded Warwick’s wife not to leave him.”

“That matter is between the Duke and the Duchess. It does not involve me.”

“Doesn’t it? I thought you were his lawyer.”

That – or banker, servant, wet-nurse; take your pick. “I was once your husband’s, also.”

“But you are not anymore.” 

Thor looks between them, uneasy, as if worried they’ll go for each other’s throats. “Sweet Anne, do we have any spiced wine for our guest? Loki, have you supped?”

“At Stonegate.”

Anne rises from her seat, gathering her skirts around her.

He watches her slip from the room. The white shape of her hand darts out and skims over Thor’s padded shoulder. He can see how the tendons in Thor’s neck go taut – how they do not relax until she has left, the emerald spitting hot in the firelight.

Thor sits and scrubs a hand over his face. “What books do you want?”

He’s tempted to say, what books do you have? You probably don’t even know. 

“Most likely I won’t be much help,” Thor adds, as if reading his mind. “And anything I do have you’ve most likely already read, thanks to your boy Peter. So I don’t know why you’re asking.” A wry smile, probably at the look on his face. “I’m not entirely stupid, Loki.”

He wants to say, news to me, but he thinks it will break their truce. Instead he says, “Peter hasn’t been passing me your accounts, if that eases you. He can’t add.”

“He can’t cook, either. I’ve had complaints about him.”

“You should change the supplier for your meat.”

“You know well enough that I can’t afford to.”

Ah, that again. “You said you borrowed heavily from Florence?”

“Not just Florence. I don’t know. Everywhere.” Thor’s hand slides carefully across the table between them and clasps loosely over his wrist. “Don’t pay any heed to what Anne says. She doesn’t know you as well as I do.”

“No, she certainly doesn’t.”

“She’s upset with me. I don’t think I’m as good to her as I should be.”

“I think,” he says, dryly, because he’s not the kind of person to dance around the subject of money, “when she married you, she expected more furs and jewels. She expected to live at court.”

“She should have married you, then.”

He ponders that for a moment. He stares down to where Thor’s body touches his own. 

“Do you know,” he says, “that in Venice and other parts of Italy, it is the New Year already?”

Thor looks at him blankly. Well, Thor has never been to Venice, so it is not likely that he would know. In some parts of the continent, the year 1537 begins on the first day of January; whereas in England, we must all wait until March. We are all trapped in the past for a few months longer. We are still left looking back on our history, clutching at a thing that has already passed us by: _what if_ , we say. _What if._

\--

Honor Middleton sits by the fireside sewing up his letters.

“The Duchess had a fall today,” she tells him. It’s useful to keep Honor around – when he left Southampton she came with him along with her husband to Stonegate, and now she passes him the servants’ gossip. “The physician had to go in and see her.”

“Was it serious?”

“I don’t think so. Robert thinks the Duke set her up to it.”

“I don’t see how he could’ve, unless he pushed her over himself.”

“Oh, he wants to.” The needle-point flashes once in the light and she bites her lip distractedly as it sinks back into the paper. “He would if he weren’t so afraid of the law.”

“These Dukes and Earls, they never seem to be happy with their women.”

“No,” Honor agrees, wistfully. “They don’t.”

He is finishing off a letter to Norfolk. The Duke himself is still in the North, thrashing the Yorkshire rebels into submission, but here in London his youngest son has gotten himself into a brawl and knifed a man in the ribs. It’s nothing that a little bit of money in the right places won’t fix. He wishes vaguely that Warwick would get himself carried off to Yorkshire as well, but then he supposes that both Dukes in the North would be a disaster; they can’t go two days without – as Norfolk once so very delicately put it – biting each other’s heads off.

“If you don’t mind me asking, master,” Honor says after a moment. “How is the house at Boughton?”

“The house itself? I suppose it’s comfortable enough.”

“I’m sorry that I never saw it.”

He glances up briefly. “Would you like to see it? I can send you off with Peter next time. And Robert, of course. I’m sure Huxley wouldn’t mind a few extra pairs of hands.”

“But then no-one will be here to sew your letters.”

“True,” he says, smiling. “No-one sews them quite as well as you. We would all be thrown into mayhem.”

“Master,” Richard calls in from the hallway, “these crates, they’ve just come over from Southampton.” There is a loud crash, and then some creative swearing. “Where would you like them?”

“In here is fine.”

Honor dutifully leaps up from her stool, tucking her needle away. “I’m done here, I think.”

“Yes, you’d better go off to bed. Richard, there’s no need for you to have that expression on your face, I won’t have you strangling anyone. Just have them put the crates there in the corner, and tomorrow you can come down nice and early to help me sift through them.”

Richard looks surprised. “You don’t want me to stay up with you?”

“I’m just finishing off a few letters. They aren’t urgent. You can copy them out for me later.”

“Alright then.”

He watches the men bungling in and out with the crates. So, Thor, he thinks; I suppose you won the argument with Anne. He puts the final touches on Norfolk’s letter, reaches out to sand and seal it, and then sits for a long moment in the still silence of his office. During the day there is the incessant sound of clerks scribbling next door, lowered voices, the susurrus of shifting paper; the dragging of stools, the neat tap of quills against the sides of inkwells, counters being placed down to make sums, the sunlight from the windows combing across the floor as if begging to be noticed. But they don’t take note of time in here. This, here, is where business is run, is where the whole of a Duke’s household is set into place and turned as precisely as clockwork. Here is where futures are made.

He picks up the next letter on the pile. Eleanor Doyle, one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, writes to thank him for the gold brooch he sent her last month.

Oh, and it may be of some interest to you, master Loki: the Queen is with child.

He frowns at the paper, as if the words might come up out of the page and dance for him. He remembers Edward Seymour – the Earl of Hertford, the Queen’s eldest brother – there was a visit to Southampton some years ago. There was ample praise for the grounds, for the castle itself, for the deer park.

Something stirs, darkly, inside him; some part of him acknowledges a gesture made in the shadows, an opportunity.

The candle gutters. He takes out a new sheaf of paper and runs over it with his palm. He flattens it, carefully, against the wood – he moulds it into something that he can use.

\--

_Two Brothers_  
May, 1537: Lismouth House

There is a commotion outside. There is a lot of shouting.

Good God, what is going on? He doesn’t like fighting outside his house, has guards appointed especially to prevent it from happening. Nothing reminds people more acutely of your birth than two rough-hewn, grizzly London beggars beating out a grievance on your front step.

“Master!”

He is already out from behind his desk. “What is it, Thomas?”

Thomas Awbrey is bent over double in the doorway, clutching his stomach. Has someone kicked him? No, he’s just trying to catch his breath. “The Earl – the – I saw the livery, master, it’s – ”

“Get it out, get it out!”

“It’s my lord Huxley,” Thomas manages. “He’s demanding to see you! Now!”

“What?”

“My lord Huxley, he said – ”

“No, no, I heard you.” It’s just that he can’t really believe it, Thor starting a brawl out in some London street. It’s like hearing the Pope has decided to put off his vestments and go begging through Southark. 

“Should I fetch Richard?”

“No, I’ll go out myself. Save my lord embarrassing himself further.”

“Should I – I mean, is my lord coming in – ”

Thomas Awbrey is like one of those gangling puppies that, in trying to please you, bring all sorts of unsavoury things into the house. He pats the boy absently on the shoulder. “No need, Thomas, you’ve done your bit for today. Run to Peter and see if he needs you.”

It’s a chilly day for Spring, still rather early, and mists rise up off the river and blow over the city. The sun is as thin and ragged as an old sheet. He’s wearing Margaret’s heart-shaped garnet and as he decides what to do, he twists it about on his finger, round and round. Now that he’s listening for it he thinks he can hear Thor’s voice slamming against the windows.

Going down the staircase, he snags William Lively by the arm. “Horses.”

“Now?”

No, next year. “Yes, now, William. And when you next see Richard tell him to clear my afternoon. If they’re serious about whatever they’re here to see me for, they can come back tomorrow.”

There’s not a free square of ground in Lismouth House. He’s only had it a few months but word has gotten out that this is the place to find him, so that on any day of the week you’ll find it packed with men whose women have gone missing, women whose children have gone missing, dogs whose humans have gone missing; the last is mainly Peter’s fault. There are merchants coming in to complain about the price of wool, and the men of Earls, Dukes, a Bishop or two, sometimes a Marquis. There are loans to be brokered and paperwork to comb through. Somebody wants advice on the value of uncut emeralds; somebody else thinks his neighbor is climbing into his property every night and pissing in his beer.

He pushes out into the sunlight. Thor has stopped shouting now, mercifully. The faces of Londoners at his gate, pale and unearthly, jostle to get a good look at him.

William trots up with the horses: “Richard is asking, do you want a guard to ride out with you?”

“The Earl won’t attack me, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, but Richard thought it might look more – ” William hesitates, fumbling for the word.

“Authoritative?” He snags the nearest bridle with a hand. “Yes, I suppose he’s right. Well, you’re in a livery coat, aren’t you, William? You’ll do very nicely. If you take that spare horse there, I’ll take this one, and we can ride out to meet the Earl together.”

“Are you going to stop and talk to him?”

“No. Just stay behind me and look straight ahead.”

Now that Thor is in disgrace, people won’t receive him. That’s the world for you, he wants to say; I have money, and you don’t. Suffolk sends me bolts of silk, fat partridges and the best wines from Aquitaine, gold thread and boars so freshly killed they are still warm – but he closes the door in your face.

Thor calls out to him as his horse passes by. He does not turn his head.

\--

He comes back one night to find Margaret slowly unpinning her hair.

“Meg,” he says, “haven’t I told you – ”

“I don’t like it,” she says. She means: I don’t like strange women fussing around me, fluttering and demurring, gingerly teasing out the hood from my hair as if I were a child. Not if I can do it myself.

He sighs and peels off his riding gloves. “Those pearls look well on you.”

“They’re the size of grapes. They’d look well on anyone.”

“You don’t like them?”

“No, I like them very much, Loki. It’s just that – ”

He watches her fiddle with the clasp on her veil. He would like to say that he doesn’t know where this is going, but the fact is that he’s more surprised it hasn’t come sooner. You’d have to be blind to miss how different things are now – the furs, the diamonds, the delicate silk cauls handmade by the city women and netted with pinpoint gems, so that they glitter in the hair like stars; he wants to tell her to enjoy it. But then again, she’s a merchant’s daughter. Some part of her doesn’t trust change at this sort of speed. It’s the first lesson we all learn: _rota fortunae_ , the wheel turns underneath blind Fortune’s fingers; the Lord giveth, and just as easily the Lord taketh away.

She catches his eye in the mirror and, unexpectedly, laughs. “Good God, husband, you look as if you are digging yourself in for a battle. Am I really so formidable?”

“I know you are not entirely pleased with what has happened these last months.”

“I’m pleased that we are rich.”

He takes the veil out of her hands and says, “But you are not pleased with _how_ we became rich.”

“Edward Seymour,” she says instead, evading him, “he owns Southampton now, doesn’t he?”

“He does.”

“I was surprised that he took it without the repairs completed. He’s not a sentimental man.”

“The repairs were finished by the time the deeds were his.” He’s half tempted to say, but Margaret, you know this already. Like a lawyer, you always make your arguments based on sound fact. So why are we having this conversation? “Nicholas Harper – you remember him, don’t you, the King’s glazier – he spent two weeks changing all the panthers in the windows to Jane Seymour’s leopard.”

“The thing is,” she says, “I don’t understand, exactly, how Thor lost the place. It doesn’t make sense for him to have spent so much on repairs, only to hand it over to Hertford for a pittance.”

“Margaret, if you are going to say something – ”

“I don’t understand how he lost Boughton either. Or half his manors. Did you give them all away?”

“I didn’t have a hand in it. You know how many creditors Thor had.”

“But it is strange, don’t you think? That they all swooped at once.”

“That’s usually how it is,” he says. The firelight drapes down over her loose brown hair, curls into her collarbone. “The moment they sense bankruptcy, they descend like vultures. They all want a share of the scraps. You know that.”

“But you were the one managing his accounts.”

“Meg,” he begins.

“No, it doesn’t matter. I suppose you had your reasons.” She flaps a hand at him. “I won’t pry.”

You never know where you are with Margaret; you never know if she’ll smile at you, or freeze you out. You think she’s forgotten something but it turns out that she’s only waiting for her chance. 

“It is only,” she says, very lightly, “that I thought you loved him.”

\--

Morning. Richard collapses into a chair, looking white, tousled. He, Loki, has been on the roads all week riding back and forth on Warwick’s business; he wants very much to collapse somewhere himself, but it is difficult to collapse onto a desk like his without accidentally putting an elbow into the ink.

Richard asks him, “How was the Duke?”

“Displeased. Suspicious.” Hardly a day goes by on which this is not the case. In the back of his mind, an unspoken fear rises up: shadowy and half-formed, darkly malignant, until he forcefully pushes it away from him. “Sometimes I think I should preempt him and put some money aside on the continent.”

Richard sits up, looking alarmed. “Did he threaten you?”

He scrubs a hand over his face. Sometimes, even teasing Richard offers no amusement.

“No, Richard, of course he didn’t. He wants the Hampton house refurbished.”

“Again? Didn’t he – ”

He finds himself slowly drifting off. He is tired. That’s how thieves get in – that’s how fires get started. He’s not ignorant of the things people are saying about him in the city: his father was an inn-keeper, his father was a no-good drunkard, his father was a Corsican pirate wanted in several Italian states for murder and kidnapping. He’s heard it all before. He wants to go up to these people and say, do you know something I don’t? Because I never knew my father; I don’t even know his name.

Richard says, hesitantly: “Master, are you asleep?”

“No.”

He wonders what Thor is doing. He imagines Anne Talbot trying to light a fire in the grate, a cloth wrapped around her hair to keep the soot out of it; he imagines them counting coins. 

“Do you think,” he says. He stops. “Never mind. Dig out our books on the Hampton house, won’t you?”

Richard gingerly gets up onto his feet. “I don’t know if we sent them back, after the last time.”

“I think Thomas Awbrey has got them downstairs. Let’s hope he hasn’t lost them.”

“Or given them away,” Richard says. 

That night, he dreams that Odin comes up out of the grave. In Florence he’d watched in an underground room as a doctor opened up a dead man’s body; the heart, he’d noted with some surprise, had been so much smaller than he’d thought it would be.

\--

“I don’t like it.”

Warwick is angry. You think you have seen Warwick angry, but you haven’t, until you’ve seen this. The Duke is a wound-up knot of energy, the mottled veins in his cheeks blown purple with rage. I don’t like it, Warwick says again: spits it out like cannon. You double-dealing, traitorous, low-born – 

He cuts the Duke short, because otherwise they’ll be at it all day. “My lord, it is only a temporary arrangement. There are only a few matters that have been entrusted to me – ”

“You are _my_ servant,” Warwick roars. “You look after _my_ interests. _My_ matters.”

“And I will continue to do so, my lord permitting, with diligence and – ”

“He’s looking to steal you from my side, mark my words.” Warwick’s fist darts out as if to make sure of this: as if to beat each word, physically, into the air. Or perhaps into Norfolk’s imaginary face. “What has he offered you? Tell me, or by God I’ll strike it out of you. Is it money?”

“A small portion. And a position in his household.”

“Which you will accept?”

“Not while I am in your lordship’s service.”

Warwick’s mouth tightens. “Then are you thinking to leave my service at any date approaching?”

“You have always been a good lord to me,” he says. “Your bounty has always been inexhaustible.”

The Duke’s clenched fingers uncurl. Warwick doesn’t look it, but it’s not possible to survive for fifty years at court without at least a rudimentary grasp of subtlety. The Duke knows a price has been named. 

Norfolk takes him to court. It’s not the first time he’s been there, but every time new faces emerge. People fall away before my Duke of Norfolk – there’s something about Norfolk’s face, the way his crooked stride eats up the floorboards, that inspires alarm. Ladies drop into terrified curtseys. Courtiers clutch at their caps. Even torches flare, the fire seeming to flinch away.

A man catches at his arm. “Are you with my lord of Norfolk?”

“I am.”

Out of the corner of his eye he sees Norfolk pounding away down the hall. The man, who is probably older than he is, bows. “The Earl of Nottingham sends his regards.”

“The Earl is too kind.”

“He wishes to speak to you, on some small matter regarding the dowry of his daughter, who is – ”

“Marrying the Earl of Surrey.” 

Norfolk’s eldest son: grisly, lean-jawed, with a habit of writing verses when he’s not hacking off the heads of rebels up in Yorkshire. Vaguely, he thinks: isn’t Nottingham’s daughter some cousin of Surrey’s? But there you have it. Half the English court is incestuous. After a while, you simply run out of new blood.

The man retreats. It is like something in a play, or perhaps a dance; the lines are forming, the partners –male and female both – are looking about cold-bloodedly for an opponent.

Norfolk, standing at the other end of the hall, is staring him down.

He takes a moment to look about himself. Every month, every week, the court changes. The Queen will soon begin her lying in. The King’s eye is roving about already in the hunt for a mistress. You hear always these stories – the hunter and hunted, the hound in pursuit of the stag, except in this case there are always the same noble families trying to proffer their daughters forward and pass them off to the King as fresh meat. In the country, the King’s court takes on mythical proportions; but here, standing in the centre of it, you see only a shifting and treacherous terrain; you see women with sharp eyes and even sharper teeth, always on the look-out for advantage; you see men who’ll sweet-talk you into your grave.

He thinks, it is a place for gamblers – for men who will play the odds. 

“What are you doing?” Norfolk snaps. The Duke has pounded back down the hall, parting the crowds of courtiers like Moses parting the Red Sea. “I’m not going to wait about for you all day. I pay you too much for that.”

He smiles. He inclines his head. He thinks, ah, but my dear Duke, I did not cross the hall; you came to _me_.

\--

Anne Talbot! He comes into the room and almost backs out of it. How on earth did she get in?

“If you must know,” she says, her voice very dry, “I came to visit Margaret.”

Hooded against the early evening chill, shedding her gloves onto his desk, her shadow weaves a little on the opposite wall. Her wrists look frail and birdlike. He remembers that she lost a child in the winter – girl or boy, or too early to tell, nobody quite knows. But what’s a child in the midst of all those lost estates? Nobody wants to mention anything as precarious as a miscarriage, now that the Queen is carrying.

He is not in the mood for this. “Lady Anne, my wife is not in Lismouth House. She is still at – ”

“My husband tells me that you will not receive him.”

“Your husband is mistaken. Lately, my business has made many demands on – ”

“I wish,” she cuts in abruptly, “that you had made it clearer to us when you first came to Boughton, what exact business you were in. Had we known you were in the business of ruining the nobility, we would perhaps have kept our finances secret from you.”

“They were barely secret, my lady. Half the court knew of your husband’s debts.”

“But only you saw fit to act on them.”

“I was sent by the Duke of Warwick.” He gestures for her to sit down, but she ignores him. “So the action was not mine. Would you have something to drink?”

“No.” 

He sees that she has the emerald around her neck – the same one he saw on her in Boughton. Clever girl, he thinks. Where did you put it, to hide it from the bailiffs? Perhaps that is why she is wearing it now, to inform him that they’re more or less on equal ground.

“My husband,” she says, “cannot believe that you have betrayed him. He will not believe it. He will not hear a word spoken on the subject.”

“Then you should place more trust in your husband.”

Her mouth twists. “You don’t need to lie to me, Loki; I’m not Thor. You can talk circles around him if you like, but I can see right through to the centre of you. You don’t have a heart. You don’t feel like other men do – you calculate. I knew you for a snake the moment I set eyes on you, and I only regret not making my feelings clearer to my husband when I had the chance.”

It’s such a vehement speech, he feels he should bow. “Madam, you are much mistaken.”

“Am I? Who are you working for? Warwick? Norfolk?”

“I am working always for your husband’s advantage.”

She moves in close and taps a single, neat fingernail against his chest. “I don’t think so. I think you’re working always for _your_ advantage. And if I can see it, don’t think others can’t.”

He sighs. He seems to be doing this more often lately than not: good sir or madam, I am innocent. Can you blame a man for making the most of the opportunities that come by him? There have been worse things done. When Anne Boleyn fell from grace, even his father distanced himself from her. It was her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, who headed the court that condemned her to death. 

You don’t get very far in this world by being sentimental. Fortune is mercurial, so you have to be too: shifting, adaptable, ready to take up at a moment’s notice and ready to abandon.

He wants to be frank with her: if you want to help your husband, you are going about it the wrong way. Insinuate yourself into court – you are still young, still very pretty. Make friends. Grant favours. One thing of mine, for one thing of yours. 

Set a high price. Don’t deliver until the payment is made. 

“I can tell what you are thinking,” she says.

He doubts it. “It is getting late now, my lady. Should I call for your horse?”

“You are thinking that, because now you work for two Dukes, nobody can touch you. But you’re wrong. You are nobody, Loki, you have nothing to back you, and when the time comes – ”

Good God, that again. He raps on the wall and calls for Richard.

\--

Edward Seymour is a pale man, tall, dark-eyed. There is something sharp about the way he looks at you; he’s of that type who can spot a lie from ten miles. Today he is wearing crimson velvet and a high, ruffed shirt, which gives him a strangely elongated look. He was made a Knight of the Garter only last year and so now the gold-knotted chain of the Order is settled waspishly on his shoulders, where it flashes and glints in the fading light like an eye.

“These plans,” Edward Seymour says. One side of the long mouth turns downward. “I won’t pretend to be entirely happy with them. I’m not content to wait for four months.”

It seems that this is the month for refurbishing estates. My lord of Suffolk wants a new garden. My lord of Norfolk wants a new chapel. My lord of Warwick wants a new wife – but that’s nothing new.

He, Loki, leans forward to point out a row of peach trees scratched messily on the map. 

“If my lord would allow me to leave these in, I can cut out a week at least.”

“But won’t they block the side entry? And you can barely see out of the windows on that side as it is.”

“I can have them trimmed.”

“Oh, don’t bother,” Seymour says, losing patience. “Leave them in.” His keen brown eye strays to the nearest window, as if to convince himself that the peach trees aren’t migrating to block his view as they speak. “I’ve heard that the sweat has broken out in the city again.”

“It has. The mayor’s wife has already fallen sick.”

“I worry for the Queen’s health. Especially at this delicate time.”

“The King is no doubt aware of the danger,” he says. Henry is notoriously terrified of the sweat; now that reports have come in, it would not be surprising if the whole court packed up and left immediately.

Seymour’s long fingers edge along the map. “Your family, are you moving them?”

“Yes. To the house in Essex.”

“Will you go with them?”

“No.”

Too hard to keep an eye on things, if you are not in London. Now that Seymour is thinking about the child in his sister’s belly – praying, no doubt, as the whole of England is, for a prince – nothing else will get done today.

He slips out into the cool, arched hallways of Southampton Castle. He closes the door behind him. His footsteps are loud in this familiar space – they come back and, like the birds of prey you hear about in stories, attack him. Thor surrendered this place up fully furnished so they are the same tapestries he has grown up with, the same hunting scenes. St Cecilia, holding a flute in one hand with her eyes raised to heaven, is trailed along one wall by a sly tendril of steam; on the wall opposite, fat cherubs open their arms to welcome the faithful to Heaven. 

You never really manage to forget your past. You think you have strangled it in the crib, but it resurrects. Like the sweating sickness, you can’t outrun it – it will find you out. Was it here when, at seven or eight, Thor fell over a carpet and opened a gash on his knee? Was it here that Frigga first kissed him? He remembers being afraid of the castle at night; its groaning, its heaving, the howl of the wind against timber, the scattered crack of hail in a storm.

He stands in the stillness for a long time. He waits for a voice to tell him who he is.

\--

May 27. Fireworks in the city. Little Henry, who doesn’t like these things, buries a head in his jacket.

Margaret is sitting in the light of a candle, patiently stitching diamonds into a quilt. The little darting point of her needle flashes red as the window lights up. She finishes a stitch, leans back to admire it, snaps the thread cleanly with her teeth.

“I really don’t think that’s necessary,” he tells her. “I can send Peter over the Channel – ”

“I like to know we’ll have ready money at hand.”

Cushions, pillowcases, two or three of her best dresses. They are all bristling with gems she has concealed in the seams. He wants to say, it won’t be hard to find us out – when all our pillows weigh a ton each.

“When are we going to Essex?” she asks. Then: “I don’t like you to stay here alone, Loki.”

“You shouldn’t worry. If I fall ill, Dr Mortimer will come by. He says he’s found a new cure for the sweat. You put vinegar, wormwood, rosewater, and some crumbs of brown bread in a linen cloth, and then you bind it underneath your nose.” He doesn’t really believe in it – but he supposes if it doesn’t cure you, at least nobody will want to be anywhere near you for several days because of the smell, so at least you won’t spread the contagion around.

“If anything does happen,” Margaret says, “you must send for me.”

“If it’s safe to do so, of course I will.”

“I mean it, husband. I don’t want you hesitating because you think I’ll catch it from you.”

Henry has fallen asleep against his chest. Is it possible for a man to be so happy? He wants to go over to his wife and kiss her, stroke a hand through her full, dark hair. “Why are they celebrating?”

Margaret looks up. “What?”

“The city. The Londoners.”

“Oh.” She frowns, suspecting a trick. “They’re celebrating the quickening of the Queen’s child.”

But it’s not _their_ child; it’s not _their_ wife. He cradles Henry’s head in his hand, so that when he gets up to look out of the window he doesn’t jostle the boy awake. 

“Do you think,” he says. He hesitates. “Have you had a visit from Anne Talbot?”

“Yes. Last week.”

“You didn’t speak of it.”

Snip, go her sewing scissors. “I thought your boy Peter would’ve told you anyway. She came on her own, she’d ridden through a rainstorm. I gave her some dry things of mine to change into, but she’s so very small – how old would she be, this year?”

“Seventeen. Eighteen. I don’t remember.”

“She cried,” Margaret says. “She was trying very hard not to, but in the end she wept.”

He is startled. Anne Talbot? Crying? Is it possible? He sees again the furious green of her eyes, the hard tap of her fingernail against his doublet. “I marvel that Thor let her out on her own.”

“She isn’t happy with him. And he isn’t happy with her, as far as I could gather.”

“Did she tell you how they live?”

“Don’t you know that already?” she bites back. Then, slowly, she softens. “They have a small house in Sussex. They are living there very quietly. She rode away in my dress, her own was so muddy – I gave her my second-best damask, the one with pearls sewn into the lining. I told her to break the stitches when she got home.” She looks into his face. “Do you mind it?”

Too late to mind it, in any case. “No. You did well.”

“I am worried she cannot pay the servants.”

Heaven forbid; then Thor would actually have to _do_ something. 

Margaret says, “Were you jealous of him? When you were children?”

“Of Thor? Not really.”

“Because I cannot understand why else you should hate him. Has he mistreated you in some way?”

He doesn’t answer. He’s not sure that it’s even hate that he feels. He hums an aimless tune into his son’s hair and looks out at the city: somewhere to the north a bonfire has gotten out of hand, and a house on the river is going up in flames.

\--

This matter with Norfolk’s son, it is like trying to cup the sea in your hands.

Nottingham writes a letter. It is perfunctory and to the point. Norfolk writes a letter, which is passing first through his hands: the wording is aggressive, like the snapping-shut of a steel trap on someone’s leg. You cannot teach Norfolk diplomacy. Not in matters like this. These marriages of the old families, you’d think they were haggling over a leg of mutton on the kitchen steps; the price decided, the item appraisingly prodded and pinched, and then only once we’ve gone through all of the basting and baking do we present the final dish to the King for his royal stamp.

The last time he’d seen the Duke, Norfolk had been in a rage: You’ve gone over to Nottingham! You’ve taken his money, you’re working for him! He wonders, why is every noble in the realm always concerned I’ve gone over to somebody else?

Honor brings him fresh candles. She blows out the stub he is working with, says, shall I close the shutter? Outside the wind is shrieking and battering about like souls out of Hell. 

“Honor, stay a moment,” he says.

She obediently sits. He almost asks her if Margaret has gone up to bed. It is there on the tip of his tongue; but then he remembers that Margaret is on the road to Essex, bumping along in a carriage and probably trying to sleep. He thinks, fretfully: Henry won’t like this weather. What if he falls ill?

“What are you doing?” Honor asks him finally. “Do you need me to sew up a note?”

“No. What time is it?”

“It is nearing eleven. Most of the household has gone to sleep.”

He cannot articulate the emotion inside of his chest. He says, “I shouldn’t keep you, then.”

“I do not mind it.”

“You might not, but Robert will.” He sets his quill down, digs the heel of his hand into his eye and rubs it. He can still see the imprint of Norfolk’s furious scrawl on the inside of his lids. “Go to bed, Honor.”

“Alright,” she says.

He sits for a long time staring into the middle distance. He was midway through a sentence when Honor came in but now he can’t remember what it was he wanted to write. The house feels dead and cold, too silent, except for the animal sounds of rats scuffling in the timbers; he thinks, what is wrong with me? I’ve gone weeks without seeing Margaret before. 

He stares back down at the letter he is writing and the words swim in front of his eyes.

He thinks about calling Honor back and asking her to build up the fire. He thinks about calling Peter, who swaggered into the house yesterday with a black eye – he hopes, sincerely, that Peter hasn’t killed anyone, though he didn’t end up asking. He thinks about calling Frigga, but Frigga is dead. A dull point behind his eyes is throbbing gently. God, but he is so tired. Did he sleep last night? No, he lay awake listening to the drunken singing on the river, to the soft, tidal drift of Margaret’s breath; now he feels like he is standing in a boat, unsure of where the ground is. His shoulders ache. He should stop writing. He thinks, I should take the advice Richard is always giving me: I should put myself into bed.

And then he _is_ in bed. Light pours into the room, fractures into splinters on the floor. His sheets are damp. In the corner of the room, a thin, fox-faced girl – Anne Talbot. 

“What are you doing here?” he tries to say. Instead, another voice emerges, saying: “Water.”

Something is pushed to his mouth. People are talking. He looks again but Anne Talbot is gone. There is a strange, palpitating beat in his chest, like a small drum. A figure leans over him – Thor! He almost shouts, but then it isn’t Thor, it’s just Peter with his black eye.

“Should we call a priest?” someone whispers.

“Goddamn you!” Peter yells, and then there is some scrapping at the door. “He’s not going to die. Get out, if you won’t be useful.”

[He wants to say, if I am going to die, I want to see Thor. I need to talk to him. He can hear my confession.](http://alekinexelsis.deviantart.com/art/MCU-The-Wheel-334937413) There are figures milling all about, Nicholas Harper, Sif who married into Oxford, Thomas Awbrey – Edward Seymour is there, and his sister the Queen, and the little prince who will rule England but is not yet born, nestled like a misshapen walnut in her outstretched hand. But what if it isn’t a prince? What if it is just another princess? It’s almost treason to think it – but so much of the universe is chance; you are born an Earl, you are not born an Earl. You are somebody, you are nobody. 

He thinks he might be crying. By the Saints, I hope Thomas Awbrey isn’t here to watch me cry. He’s not afraid of dying, but he feels a great sense of waste; and then, buried beneath that, he feels ashamed.

For almost fifty years, before the reign of this Tudor king’s father, before Henry VII, this country was in civil war. The rivers of England ran flush with blood. The House of Lancaster claimed its right from John of Gaunt, the fourth son of Edward III; the House of York, from Edward’s third and fifth sons, Lionel of Antwerp and Edmund of Langley. The bloodshed continued until Henry Tudor – a remote claimant of Lancaster – defeated Richard of Gloucester in the fields of Bosworth, and took Elizabeth of York as his Queen; and so were the two Houses united, and we enter now into our present peace.

What do you know of the world? Trace the history back far enough, and it all begins with two brothers.

\--

_Oceans_  
June, 1537: Lismouth House

When he finally rises from his bed, his legs barely support him.

“Begging your pardon, master,” Richard says. There are large, purple bruises beneath Richard’s eyes, but relief oozes from him in waves. “You have lost so much weight, I feel like I could swing you across my arms and carry you like an infant.”

He is edging, gingerly, along the wall. “Careful. The way things are, I might accept your offer.”

“Would you like me to bring in a chair?”

The door bangs open. Peter comes barging in, heedless, headlong, a flurry of limbs; it is like watching a thunderstorm breaking out indoors. “I’m back!”

“For God’s sake,” Richard snaps, “do you really have to _shout_ – ”

And then they both look on, stunned into silence, as Peter bursts into tears.

He thinks: I have never seen Peter cry. All too often you forget that people are capable of it. He wants to go over and offer some sort of comfort but he is nailed to the wall, his muscles shaky and treasonous. He tries to say, now, Peter, take a good look at me – I’m not dead, so you’re not allowed to cry. Because then you’ll have no tears left when my funeral finally comes along, and then we’ll all be in a difficult situation.

Peter drags a muddy sleeve across an even muddier face. “Begging your pardon, I didn’t – ”

“No, don’t beg my pardon. Richard has already done that. Come here.”

Peter smells like the air outside. The grip on his shirt is as tight as the clutch of a child’s after a nightmare. Richard says, Peter, you’re getting mud all over him, and he says, oh, never mind it. 

“We sent for the apothecary,” Peter tells him. “We sent for – forgive us – we sent for the priest.”

“The apothecary wouldn’t come,” Richard says. 

“I suppose he didn’t want to catch the contagion. What about Mortimer?”

“Mortimer’s out of the country, we couldn’t find him.”

“Did you send for Margaret?”

A silence falls. At first he thinks they haven’t heard him – his voice is unreliable. But then Peter pulls away, face turned to the side, and some part of him knows.

For a moment he struggles. His fingernails scrabble behind his back on the limned boards of the wall, trying to find a handhold. He repeats himself. He asks them, individually and in turn: _did you send for_ – He can see that neither of them wants to say it out loud. 

Christ in Heaven, he thinks; I need that chair now.

It’s Richard who steps forward to catch him. “Master, please, you must sit down. You are still not well.”

“Is she ill, or is she dead?”

Peter says, “She came as soon as she heard. We could not bar her from seeing you, she was – ” Peter fidgets. “She was adamant. She said she had your permission.”

Richard, frightened: “Don’t speak of it any more right now. Can’t you see he’s not ready?”

Ready? Is anyone ever ready for death? As a lawyer, he notes each word precisely. They are carved irrevocably into his memory, something else that will come back to haunt him when he cannot sleep at night: _Came. Was. Said._ They have put him back on the bed. And the boys – Richard, the Richard who will one day bear his name – and Henry, with his halo of golden hair? He pictures their bodies, small and frail, being tumbled into a mass grave next to the river; his body is wracked with a physical hurt. His chest aches and twists underneath his skin.

“Henry caught it, but God spared him,” Richard says. “And your Richard, he did not take ill.”

He fists a hand into this Richard’s sleeve. “Then someone must go to them, they must be – where – ”

“I think they are in the Essex – ”

“No,” Peter cuts in. “They were moved last week. Honor is with them now.”

At least they will have some motherly tenderness there. Oh, he thinks; oh Margaret. You did not keep your promise after all. You told me, as good as guaranteed me, that you would be safe – I have delivered on my side of the bargain, but you have weaseled out of yours.

Richard speaks up, hesitant, not shifting out of his grip yet: “Master, do you want us to – ”

Yes. He releases Richard’s sleeve. Yes. Go.

The thing with grief is that you never know how to approach it. There are no roads between the marshes, no lamps or candles strung up to guide your way. You are dropped cleanly into the ocean.

Before the two of them have reached the door, he says, “Have you made any enquiries – ”

“The sweat did not reach Sussex,” Peter says.

\--

The first thing he does is go down to the counting house. The clerks, when they see him, pull up abruptly and gape at him.

“Master,” William Abbas asks, “are you sure you should be out of bed?”

No, he decides; I cannot be here, with my old life peeping out at me from under every wooden desk and out of every drawer. I cannot go back to the bills and to Norfolk’s arguments. This much in gold, that much in plate, half of it delivered along with your daughter, the rest to follow a month afterward.

“Would you like your letters?” William says, looking at him doubtfully.

“Yes. But not now. Maybe later.”

“Should I get a boy to send up some wine?”

What good will that do? Wine isn’t going to bring back the dead.

The sweat has been kinder this year, at least objectively. It has not been like some previous years in which entire quarters of London have been wiped out. This year only a choice few have been taken.

He says, “Catherine Paulet, the mayor’s wife. Did she survive it?”

“Barely,” William tells him. “The doctors say she may never be able to carry a child again.”

So this is what happens – God says, I want you, and you. But you, Catherine Paulet, I shall not gather you up. He goes out to the gardens. They are still small because he’d only just paid people to start working on them three weeks ago, a stone fountain in the shape of a swan, a bank of damask roses and lavender, the scent of river silt mixing with the fresh bite of pine. He’d wanted to move Margaret and the children to Lismouth House. For sure it would be noisy; but in a few months, he’d thought, we would be used to it.

He sits on the edge of the fountain – still bone-dry – and looks down at the ring Margaret gave to him. He has the sense of a slow, inevitable slide, like a tipped set of scales.

“A fountain without any water,” Richard had said to him weeks ago, frowning. There had been some problem with the pipes. “I don’t like it, if you don’t mind me saying so, master. It feels like an omen.”

\--

Warwick comes stomping in on an afternoon not long after.

The Duke is beaming. The spiteful little blue eyes spin about, taking in everything: the wooden paneling, the paintings, the hand-woven tapestries, the servants, the maids in their mourning garb. The clients and the petitioners, who – now that danger of the sweat has seeped away – are again packing Lismouth House to the rafters. One of the wild dogs that Peter keeps about the place shrinks, whining, into a corner. 

Warwick is wearing a heavy riding cloak that makes him look as broad as an axeman. It has been raining; water drips down in his wake, leaving perilous, shining puddles on the tiles. 

Richard comes thumping upstairs, out of breath. Master, Master!

He, Loki, looks up from his desk, where he is half-heartedly sealing a letter. “Yes, what?”

“The Dukes are here. They are downstairs. They have come – I think they have come to arrest you!”

“What?”

“Warwick came in just a moment ago, and now my lord of Norfolk – ”

He spreads his palms over the letter. A bit of lukewarm wax moulds itself to his fingers, trapping and holding on to the ridges and grooves of his skin. “Are you sure?”

“Yes!” Richard is sucking in air and clutching at a chair-back. “Peter is detaining them now, but it cannot be long before they come upstairs.” 

“Who do they have with them?”

Richard stares at him like he’s lost his mind. “Does it matter?”

It’s obvious that Richard expects him to call for a horse and go galloping out of the back door. But what’s the point of that? He’s got half a household here, the rest in the other London house, in Essex, scattered in manors over half the countryside – what’s he going to do, let Warwick chew them up when he’s gone? He has a sudden ridiculous image: him riding for the ports at Dover with his sons and three of Margaret’s pillowcases slung over his saddle. Loose gems tumbling out of the stitching at intervals. A trail of diamonds, of rubies glittering on the road, like the blood of a stag blundering away from the hunt.

“Master,” Richard says, now clearly panicking; “you must – you can’t just sit there! Can’t you – ”

Footsteps. A woman gives a stunned shout and there is the sound of something being dropped. A pot of ink? Norfolk is grousing about something, his pithed voice like gravel, scouring the floorboards.

He pushes himself to his feet. His mind is racing but he feels he would prefer to stand up. If you are taken by surprise, if a hole opens up before you in the street and threatens to pitch you into Hell, if you are being led to the place of your execution; first, you must stand up. 

It is Warwick, leading the charge. “Ah, Loki!”

“My lord. If you had some pressing business with me, you need only have sent for me. I would have ridden to you right away.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Norfolk says, chuckling. “Try and talk your way out of this one. I said it would be so.”

“Richard, go and fetch the Dukes some chairs. They should not stand.”

“We aren’t staying,” Warwick tells him, with relish. “And neither are you.”

“Whatever can you mean, my lord? This is my house.”

Richard is frozen in place. He doesn’t want to leave the room. Richard’s eyes say, if I step out of this doorway, I’ll come back to find you gone and the sky caved in.

He doesn’t want anybody starting a fistfight. “Richard,” he says. “ _Chairs_.”

Norfolk is wandering about: an entitled, ducal stride, like touring the battlements. “What’s this?”

“An astrolabe, my lord.”

“You use it?” Norfolk is puzzled. Calculate the stars? Who gives a fig about the stars?

“No, my lord. It was a gift.”

“That’s how he makes so much money on our business,” Warwick says. “He arranges something for us – a new wall, a new lease, this and that person can give you what you want – but all the while he’s hiking up the price and taking a generous cut from the middle.”

“My lord, I don’t see any of that money. Nowadays if you want a thing done, you must bribe somebody.”

Norfolk tugs roughly at a hanging on the wall. “What’s this then? If it’s not a bribe?”

He looks at the hanging. Two women are sitting at the side of a pool of water with beds of flowers strewn about their feet. They are not smiling, but not frowning either; they are simply observing the world as it sifts past them in all its peaks and troughs, as if to say, we have been here since the beginning of time and seen that none of this is original. All of this has happened before – to other people, in other houses. Men have been made and unmade by fortune since the Garden of Eden.

He says, with his voice very level, “What is it that I am accused of?”

Embezzlement, Warwick tells him. Appropriating funds not your own. Theft. Fraud. But it hardly matters; he understands now that his real crime is that he did not choose one Duke over the other. A man without a master is inherently dangerous; such a man must be eliminated. 

As he’s being led out, he catches Richard’s sleeve. He is willing his fingers not to shake. “I want you to take care of the household now, they are still in mourning.”

“I will, master, I’ll write endless letters, petitions – ” 

“I want you also to take care of Margaret’s things. I want you to send for Honor, do not tell the boys – ”

They break out into the sunlight. Warwick is wearing a maliciously pleased expression; Norfolk looks savage. Men in both the Dukes’ livery are milling about. Two officers of the law stand nearby, stern, straight-faced, but mildly perplexed. 

Londoners outside his gate are jeering. He wonders briefly if they even know who he is.

Machiavelli tells us, in his book _Principalities_ , the story of the condottiero Francesco Bussone, Count of Carmignola. Carmignola was a mercenary general hired by Venice to defeat the Duke of Milan; but when the battle was won at Maclodio, Carmignola became indecisive. He did not push forward, and he did not pull back. He made treaties, and he broke them. He maintained always a state of equipoise – as soldiers of fortune will, in order to profit most from both sides. The Venetians, who could not use Carmignola but could not afford losing him to Milan, had him arrested, and he was beheaded in the public square. His head was placed on a spike in the castle. His body was tossed out and torn apart by dogs.

\--

The place in which he is kept is small, dank, and smells of stale urine.

Norfolk paces the cracked stone floor. The Duke is dressed in expensive, imported wool, a blue so dark it seems to absorb whatever warmth is left in the air; the Duke’s jacket is lined with thick, jet-black sables. 

“Warwick’s newest estate,” Norfolk says. It comes out gritty, like the sound of two bones being mashed together. “I want to know how he paid for it. I want to know what he’s trying to do. Is he trying to eat into my territory? By St Jerome, I won’t allow it. I’ll wring his accursed neck.” This is a one-sided conversation. Since dawn Norfolk has been here, stamping and creaking, his sables bristling in the half-dark. “And where is he hiding his women? I’ve got a laundress myself, everybody knows it, the daughter of my secretary, a lovely little thing, but my wife won’t stop giving me grief – she can’t understand it, she wants me to send her away. Damned if I’ll do it.”

All morning it has been like this: one secret of mine, for one secret of yours. But he, Loki, knows all the Duke’s secrets anyway. And in any case half the country knows about Bess Holland.

Norfolk glares at him, thwarted. “Damn you, Loki, why won’t you cooperate?”

I want terms, he says. I want guarantees. I want to know that if I give you the information you want, you won’t have me hanged. But really, he’s just buying time – information or not, he knows that Norfolk wants him dead; and if Norfolk doesn’t, Warwick does.

“Well, alright.” Norfolk blows grudgingly on his aged, cracked hands. “We’ll talk about it.”

“We can talk about it tomorrow, my lord. For the moment, I would like some paper and ink.”

They are given to him. When the Duke is gone and the great, clanking door is bolted shut, he finds the brightest spot in the room and curls up in it.

He wants to get a message to Richard but isn’t sure how to go about it. The Dukes will be reading every scrap of paper that goes out of this room. How do you say, without arousing suspicion, have you cut up all the seams of my late wife’s dresses and liberally distributed what you find to those who can get me out of here? What I need, he thinks, is to see Richard face to face. But the Dukes will hardly allow that.

He finds that he is chewing on the end of the quill. The pads of his fingers are trembling.

Good God, man, get a hold of yourself. He digs a thumb into his temple. _Think_. But all he can think of is how he got to this moment, Thor holed up in the country and ruined, Margaret in the earth, his children packed off somewhere and probably crying: little Richard who is making a very slow progress in Latin, little Henry who is afraid of thunderstorms. Whatever you accuse me of, I admit it now – I am guilty. What is the point of any further denial? Yes, I was jealous. Yes, I will own it: I was cruel. In the smoky pall of a fire, I leaned forward and placed my mouth where it had no right to be. Yes, I called in Thor’s creditors, I sold off his houses; yes, I abandoned him for those more powerful than him – because that is how you make your way, if you are not born with the world tucked inside your fist. That is how you survive; how you deal with a thing that will hold you back.

Water is trickling down the wall and wetting his shoulder. He would like more than anything to forget his childhood, to forget the play-fights in the fields and the dry, warm grip of Thor’s palm. You can kill a creature more easily if you did not raise it – you can hate with more freedom, if you did not once love.

He uncaps the ink-horn. His spreads the paper out, smooth, on his thigh.

_My dearest brother, by the love that I have always borne you, and by the love that I continue to bear for you still –_

\--

“You ask a lot of me,” Thor says.

Thank God it is Thor, and not Anne Talbot. He can imagine what Anne Talbot would say. 

As if reading his mind, Thor tells him, “Anne did not wish me to come.”

“And yet, here you are.”

Thor’s face is tired. It has been – what – three months? Four? It is obvious that Thor expects him to lead this conversation, to steer it away from the rocks that are littered all throughout their experiences with each other, but he barely knows what to say.

“To be honest, I do not know how I can help you.” Thor is standing at the far end of the room, shoulders hunched against the cold. “I have very little means, and even scanter influence.”

“Can you not go to court? Beg an audience with the King?”

Thor looks at him blearily. “On what grounds? The King does not know who you are.”

“But you are an Earl, Thor. Your request does not count for nothing. If you could – ”

He stops talking. He can hear the desperation in his own voice and it repulses him. Thor is looking away, following a bead of water as it snakes down the side of the only window – which is barred, just in case he, Loki, gets any ideas. 

He does not know how to put this to Thor in a way that does not sound ridiculous. I know that I destroyed you, and I am really very sorry, but if you could please help me I would be extremely grateful?

“Thor,” he begins. “I know of late we have not been on the best of terms – ”

“I am under no obligation to you, Loki,” Thor interrupts, without heat. “Any feeling between us, any tenderness we had towards each other in our childhood, I think we have spent it. I am not saying this to be malicious. I have no desire to exact revenge on you. It is simply that I do not believe we are any good for each other, and perhaps it is just better to – ”

Thor makes a gesture with his hands: clasping them together, loosely, and then drifting them apart.

He says, “Norfolk means to hang me. Warwick too. Do I understand, then, that you mean to let them?”

“If you are innocent of their charges, the jury will find for you.”

“So you will not help me.”

“So you are not innocent,” Thor says.

He cannot put a name on the emotion curling inside his chest. “Thor, you once said that you knew me.”

“And I was wrong in that instance. As my current circumstances never cease to remind me.” Thor is fiddling with his gloves, which are made of that cheap kind of leather – rough as sandpaper. “Even now, I do not understand why you – but then, I suppose, it hardly matters.”

“I think I was angry, and jealous of the things that had been given to you.”

“But now you find that you need me.” Thor sighs, and puts the gloves away. “Don’t you have your own people? Your own friends in the city? I only ask because they might be better placed to aid your cause.”

He wants to say, but they are like me, Thor; their loyalties are flexible.

“I have asked,” he says. “They cannot do anything for me.”

“So I am your last resort?”

“You are my only resort, Thor.”

For a very long moment the room is silent.

“You know,” Thor says, finally, “that day when I went to your house – after I lost everything – I did not believe that you had betrayed me. I had all the evidence before me but I did not believe it. I told myself that it was all some kind of mistake, that I had only to see you and you would explain it to me; I’m not a lawyer, as you know, I have no eye for contracts, or for what they mean. Even when I was stopped at your gate I believed there had been a misunderstanding. I confess that I fought with your guards, because I was certain that they had not understood your instructions – but when you rode out, you and your boy, sitting so tall and proud, in your fine wool coat and your chain of gold, with the emeralds on your fingers – I was sure that you had seen me, but you did not even glance in my direction. That was when I knew.” Thor looks him in the eye, without a shred of accusation. “I knew then that I was nothing to you.”

“You are not – Thor, that isn’t – ”

“It forced me to rethink every exchange I’d had with you. Every word you’d ever spoken to me. Every look. That night before Father passed away, when you kissed me at Southampton – ”

“I swear to you, that was genuine. I swear it. Thor.” He pushes himself to his feet.

“No, don’t,” Thor says, pre-empting him wearily. “I hate to see you like this.”

He thinks: like an animal, groveling. Like a beggar in the street. The mortification hits him like a blow to the stomach and he almost staggers backward, clutching at the stone of the wall; he feels sick.

Thor says, getting up, “I will go to the King for you. But after that, Loki, I will do no more.”

\--

“You have a letter,” Warwick says, and tosses it.

It goes skittering across the flagstones. The fact that Warwick has already read it is betrayed by the wax seal, flapping limply behind it like a snapped wing.

He says, “You might as well tell me what’s in it, my lord. Since I don’t have a candle in here.”

“By the blood of Christ, I’m not some page of yours. Read it yourself.”

At Lismouth House, things are being inventoried. Both Norfolk and Warwick have men blundering about the place, taking tallies, making calculations: what can be carried away on the spot, what will require carts. It seems the Dukes have grossly inflated ideas of what is owing to them. He can imagine Richard going from room to room, indignant, cloth cap crooked on his curly head – excuse me, but have you a writ for this? As far as I am aware, my master has not been convicted, so what are you doing? 

He can imagine Peter, snarling at the intruders and breaking wrists.

These boys are all he has left. Richard and Peter, Richard and Henry. Margaret he cannot think about too much or it becomes unbearable. Thor, also, is an unlit expanse of marsh, the ground too soft for any firm or reliable footing; it is like looking into a mirror and trying to meet your own eye. It is too difficult.

Warwick says, “I want to know of your dealings with Edward Seymour.”

But he says nothing. His mouth, he has stitched it shut.

\--

Peter! In the doorway, looking staunch but pale. He cries out, jumps up, keenly aware that he is a fraction of his former self: thin and gaunt, his cheekbones jolting out of his face like two knife-blades.

Peter gawps at him. “Master, have they – do they not feed you in here?”

“Of course they feed me,” he says, thinking: more or less. He pats the pallet of straw that is his bed nowadays. “Sit down! By God, it is good to see you. How did you manage to get in?”

“I paid an entrance fee to the jailer.”

“Do either of the Dukes know you are here?”

“I paid the man a little bit extra, to keep his mouth shut.” Peter is looking about the place; his face darkens as he crumbles a bit of dirty straw between his fingers. “They should not be keeping you in here. You’ve only just recovered from the sweat, it isn’t – it isn’t right.”

“Warwick doesn’t have much respect for the sweat. Or for anything else, for that matter.”

“And Norfolk – ” Peter laughs, a hard, brittle sound.

“Never mind that now. You don’t have much time. What is the news at home?”

“They are taking the house apart. Stripping the hangings off, removing the carpets.”

“I heard as much in Richard’s letter. The Dukes read my letters, by the way, so it would be best if – ”

Peter snorts. “Of course they read your letters. Don’t fret about it, Richard’s not stupid. Although he gives a good impression of it most of the time. We found three quilts and two pillowcases.” Peter is counting them off on his fingers. “Four cushions, two dresses.”

“That should be most of it.”

“It is lucky,” Peter says, “the Dukes aren’t that interested in bedding. Or we would all be in trouble.”

“Who are you sending them to?”

“Anybody who might be called to sit on your jury. Richard has it in hand.”

Thank God. He leans his head back. “And Honor? The boys?”

“They are all safe and well. They are out of London, so we have made sure the boys have not heard.”

“I sent a letter to Hertford – the Queen’s brother, you know – but I haven’t received a reply.”

“No doubt he does not wish to offend the Dukes.”

True. Norfolk can be formidable. He thinks, also, that Edward Seymour is saving up all the royal favours he can get; he is choosing what he asks for, in case the child in the Queen’s belly is not a son.

“I have been thinking, Peter,” he says. “I have been looking back on where I went wrong. Where I mis-stepped, in all of this. Can you pick it out? I have reached a conclusion myself, but I am not sure if it is obvious to others. I want your opinion.”

Peter picks at a thread on his shirt. “I do not think you are to blame for this, master.”

“That’s a lawyer’s answer. I want _your_ answer.”

The boy looks at him and sighs. “Begging your pardon then, but I think that – perhaps it was not a wise move, to bring down the Earl of Huxley. Warwick, the thing he’s most terrified about is being murdered by his own people. He keeps a knife under his bed. I heard it from a maid who used to clean his rooms. And he keeps a bolt on his door. And Norfolk, he’s old nobility, it goes against the grain for him to see you – yourself be not offended, sir, you’re just a lawyer – bringing down an Earl.”

He is impressed. “Peter, you’ve grown up.”

“Well, I’m not a kitchen boy any more.” Peter stretches out his legs, displays his grimy boots. For some reason Peter never manages to keep his clothes clean. “Why did you do it?”

“Do what? Oh.” He shrugs, uneasy. “I don’t know.”

“I thought you grew up with him. Like brothers, and all that. Richard told me so.”

He begins to say, ah, but Cain and Abel were brothers – then he stops. It does not feel like an appropriate thing to bring up, under the circumstances.

“I have heard,” Peter tells him, curiously, “that Huxley has gone to court. With his wife.”

There is a bang on the door. The jailer, a sallow man with a heavy beard and a scowl, is peering in through the bars. Peter stomps the heel of his boot on the stone like he’s pretending it’s the man’s skull; he snaps, blackly, levering up off of the straw – alright, damn you, I’m on my way out.

\--

July. Norfolk comes in again, brows crammed together on his forehead, spitting nails.

“Well?” the Duke shouts at him. “Don’t just sit there. Get up onto your feet, you scoundrel. God’s blood, I say, get yourself up!”

He stands. He is edgy, alert. He senses, buried somewhere within the Duke’s anger, a strange sort of fear. Norfolk is only ever afraid of one thing and that is the King: it is said that whenever Thomas Howard comes into the presence, his elderly knees knock together; he trembles, he wavers; he flinches like a dog who knows that a kick is coming, and that he cannot bite back.

“You are to go out,” Norfolk says. Stamp, stamp, stamp, go the Duke’s boots. “You are to – leave.”

He waits. Is that all? I am to go out, where?

Norfolk fixes him with a fiery black eye. “Am I not making myself clear?”

“Am I free to go home then, my lord?”

“You are free to go and drown yourself in the ocean,” Norfolk bites out. “And I wish you would.”

What an amiable note, to part on. He’s not offended. It’s hard to be offended at a time like this, when you are so relieved you can barely put one foot in front of the other. 

There is no horse for him outside, only the sharp whistle of the wind from the banks of the Thames. He leans against the wall. He can still feel Norfolk’s gaze sticking into his back, muscling aside the layers of flesh to get at the bone – robbed of the chance to physically impale him, Norfolk is settling for the next best option. It is late; he is surprised by this; surprised to find that the stars are beginning to break out into the sky, icy, shrill, pin-pointed and alarmingly brittle; someone on the other bank is singing. There is a mist across the water, through which thin swathes of light emerge. Somebody whistles. Oil lamps are being lit; the sound of a dog’s yapping rises up, intermingling with the plaintive trill of a bird. 

It seems a lifetime ago since he left these shores for Florence to take up his training in Italy. He left to master the money markets and the drift of fortune; he learned to put his heart aside, to slide it shrewdly across the table and say, how much will you give for this? 

An infant is squalling in the next street over. He stands by the riverbank; he breathes England in.

\--

Outside Thor’s house, there is a cart being loaded. Plain wooden chests are being stacked, one by one, by a gangly boy in a felt cap and notional whiskers – it is a child’s face, really, not more than fifteen.

He stops the boy with a hand on his arm. “Is your master going somewhere?”

“No, sir. But my lady is.” The boy wipes a stripe of sweat off his brow. “To Kent.”

“May I go in?”

“Nobody stopping you, sir.”

It is strange, to walk in on a household at once packing itself up and unpacking. Nobody gives him a second glance. There is a child sitting on the crude wooden staircase, scrubbing and slopping water about; a small dog, about the length of a forearm, sprawls forward with its pointed head resting on its paws.

Thor appears at the top of the stairs, carrying a woman’s cloak draped over one arm. “Anne?”

“I think she has gone to her bedchamber,” the child says. A high, piped voice. “But George is outside, he’ll pack it into a trunk for you. He’s got nothing better to do.” Then, like an afterthought: “Sir.”

“Thomas,” Thor says. “Can’t you shift aside? I can’t get past if you – ”

[He sees the exact moment when Thor catches sight of him – he, Loki, a single still figure amidst all the chaos.](http://atavistique.livejournal.com/31675.html) For a second Thor’s eyes widen; something flicks over his face, like a struck flint, there and gone. 

Then a shutter closes on Thor’s expression. “Loki.”

He gestures around him. “I have caught you at a bad time, it seems.”

“No. It is as good a time as any other. But I was not expecting you.”

“They did not tell you I had been released?”

Thor’s eyes rake over him. He can almost hear what Thor is thinking: the slow, agonizing debate over whether or not to lie. “No. They did not.”

“But then, you have only just returned from court.”

“I have.”

Thor navigates down the soapy steps. The dog whines in protest. The child scuttles backward, so that the edge of the cloak Thor is still holding – black, wool, heavy but missing a fur trim – narrowly avoids brushing a dirt-smudged nose. I’ll take that, if you’d like, a servant says, indicating the garment, but Thor seems intent on delivering it to its owner personally; as they round the corner deeper into the house he can see that Thor is holding onto it with white knuckles, a tight, throttling grip.

“Have you been to see your people?” Thor asks him, politely. “I trust they were relieved?”

“We are all very indebted to you.”

“Then you are all mistaken. It was Anne who spoke to the King for your cause.”

Anne Talbot? He is so startled he has to stop walking. “ _Anne_ – ”

“It was a condition of our separation. You are perhaps aware, by now, that we are separating.” Thor leads them into a room near the back of the house; overhead, muffled footsteps. “She is going away to Kent. By the way,” Thor adds, and here he does look mournful, “I was sorry to hear of Margaret’s death.”

He cannot help thinking that they have stopped on the edges of a battlefield, and are looking back in dismayed realization at the body count. 

“There is not a day or a night that goes by,” he says, “when I do not think of her.”

“Anne always spoke of her with the highest regard.”

“Of course, they were friends.”

Thor looks at him. There is something sad and worn there, like an old coin. “And what are _we_ , Loki?”

“I should like to think,” he says, though without much hope, “that we are friends also.”

“Perhaps. I should like to think that too, though I am not sure if I believe it.”

He wants to say, please don’t ask me to explain myself. Because I cannot. There are some things that you cannot understand in retrospect – it is not always possible to unravel the dark threads of your own motive, once the event has passed. It is like waking up after a nightmare, when you still think the dream is real; you are afraid but you do not know what exactly you are afraid of; the dream, and its specifics, are already gone from your memory. You are left only with its consequences.

He swallows the strange knot in his throat. “Was it you then, or Anne, who made the request – ” He pauses. “Was it you who set down the condition that I must leave England?”

“No. That was the King’s wish, to avoid overly offending the Dukes.”

“I see. But all my property is forfeit to the Crown.”

“Yes.”

“Will it be possible for me to return, at some later – ”

“Loki, I really do not know.” Thor sits, crumpling the cloak into a miserable ball in his lap. “I cannot think so far ahead. I am simply – I have my wife to see off, and my servants’ wages to pay, and a small consignment to check down at the docks – ”

“You have gone into trade?” he says, surprised. “Richard did not tell me of that.”

“He probably did not think it was something you would care to know.”

“He understands me better, I should think.”

“I want to reclaim Southampton.”

He would like to sit, but some part of him is afraid of being at eye-level. “From the Seymours?”

“I do not care for the other houses,” Thor says. “Not so much, in any case. Hester is too far away, and Boughton – I would be glad, in all truth, never to see Boughton again. All the manors, all the farms and the grand estates. They are lost now, what more can be done? But Southampton, I think – Southampton is home.”

“If I go to Genova,” he says with a weak smile, “I shall see if I can find someone who’ll give you a loan.”

“I would take it.” Thor sighs, then – it’s a very near thing – returns the smile. “These days, I have very little to lose.”

Look at us. Thor comes to grip his hand, like they are parting strangers. Look at who we once were and who we’ll never be again; he asks, will you come to see me off? I leave tomorrow.

Thor hesitates; relents. “Of course.”

\--

_Epilogue_  


Turn to face the ocean, the ship in port, tiny, crammed, the hatches banged down, the hull brimming with bolts of woolen cloth headed for the continent; he and his sons, this is what they are travelling on. Henry, who does not quite understand where they are going, or why, tugs at his hand: will we be very long on the water? Will we be gone months and months?

Richard, his Richard, says: “We are going to Calais.”

Calais, first, then a slow progressive trickle through France, until we reach Italy; where we may stay, or we may not. Peter leans on the side of the ship and points down at the water. Look, Henry! Fish!

Of course, there are none. But it is something to distract the child, who is beginning to cry.

There are other things to be seen in the sea. In stories, we are given tales of mermen, or women who are one part human, another part fish; we are told stories of the whale that once swallowed Jonah, and may resurface to swallow up some other unfortunate one day. Beneath the water there is a world of rock and current and half-drowned kelp, of shells to which the ocean has leant its voice; beneath the water there is another world. 

At the beginning of June, an alchemist named Joseph Mayne went about claiming he had discovered a way to transform base metal to gold. You take ground pearls, you take copper, you take fresh sea salt; you apply heat and fire, you apply water; charcoal and chalk; you need a contraption, which of course only he has, and by balancing all of the natural elements you create the most valuable one of all. Nobody has seen him work this contraption, but everybody says he has succeeded. It is perhaps something people wish to believe – it is always at the heart of our myths, a transformation. 

Peter had scowled when he’d heard it. “He wants pearls? God’s blood. You can exchange those for gold any day of the week. It’s just a cheap trick.”

For, of course, we must remember, it is a trick; there is no easy way. There is no short path.

Thor comes up onto the boat. You do not expect to see a man like Thor on the sea – he does not look like he could weather it. He looks at Richard, and then at Henry. “So these are your sons?”

“We are,” Richard says, very solemn.

“You are not afraid of a sea voyage, are you?”

“No. Or at least, I’m not. But Henry’s just a baby.”

“Good man.” Thor smiles. He gives Richard a playful scruff on the head, which puts a shy, sideways smile on the child’s face. “Run below deck with your brother for a moment, will you? I’d like a talk with your father. Peter?”

Peter looks between them shrewdly. “I’ll go find Richard. He should know we are leaving soon.”

Turn back to England, where you can just see – lo and behold – the scrawny figure of Richard in a black jacket, one hand battling against the sea wind to keep his cap jammed on his head. Arguing. A loading boy is gesticulating at the trunk Richard has at his feet. Peter goes thundering down the gangplank – hackles up, ready to resort to fists. He, Loki, almost wants to call out. The poor loading boy doesn’t even know what’s coming to him.

Thor says, looking on, you have a family of sorts that loves you; you are blessed.

“Peter doesn’t speak Italian,” he says. “We are hoping to have that mended.”

“You have contacts in Italy, with whom you can lodge?”

“Until I find a house of my own.” He turns. You cannot avoid the subject forever. “Thor – ”

Thor’s eyes, they are as blue as the sea he is sailing into. But that is deceptive. He wants to ask, that day before we went to court, when you put your hand on my neck and told me that you were afraid – that day when you put your mouth on mine and said, I will not permit you to leave. What were you afraid of?

“Thor, I will come back,” he says. “Some day. I swear it.”

“Do not come back too soon. I have no desire to see your head stuck on a spike by the Bridge.”

“Neither do I.” The ocean air, high and chill, batters his face. So it is not a refusal, he thinks; only a postponement. We both need time. “I take the lesson.”

He watches as Thor leaves; watches the retreating back until it disappears into the crowd. 

Beneath the sea, ghosts stir. Odin’s water-logged bones turn slowly in the silt. Margaret, with her small hands lifted to her hair, wades her way between the coral, trailing her skirts. Norfolk is there, and Warwick also, although these last two are not yet dead; but we leave the past behind, we consign it to the deep, where we now know it belongs. We let phantoms be phantoms. There is no point allowing the past to define you. When the North rose up in revolt against the Henry Tudor that is now, Norfolk rode up and had scores of them hanged in the fields; consider that, and you know that worse things in this world have happened. Greater betrayals than this have been laid down in the earth. There are stories told of course, but when are there not stories? Go up to Yorkshire or Lincolnshire now, and you’ll find men tilling the fields, driving their mules about on the road. You do not forget, but you do not dwell on it. You move on.

Peter returns, looking scuffed and triumphant. “Master, are we going?”

“Yes,” he says. He gestures at the gangplank, which is being lifted up. “I think we are.”

Put yourself above the ocean. Bury your dead. One day, you will return to this place; but it is not today.

**Author's Note:**

> A giant thank-you to my beta-readers, [incandescent](http://incandescent.livejournal.com) and [laria_gwyn](http://laria_gwyn.livejournal.com). You guys are the best! And this fic would never have gotten completed without my cheerleaders: [datingwally](http://datingwally.livejournal.com), [safiagem](http://safiagem.livejournal.com), [mondays_eyes](http://mondays_eyes.livejournal.com), [ampliflyer](http://ampliflyer.livejournal.com), and [janesgravity](http://janesgravity.livejournal.com)! You guys kept me going when all I wanted to do was give up. I would never have finished this without you. ♥
> 
> Another huge thank-you to my artists again, who put in so much time to illustrate this self-indulgent little fic. Thank-you Gaby, Yvonne, and Alek! It was such a pleasure working with you.
> 
> Any and all feedback is much appreciated! I am actually considering writing a sequel, depending on how this fic goes, so do let me know if you'd like a continuation :) For updates on any future fics, feel free to add me on [LiveJournal](http://epistolic.livejournal.com) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/epistolic)! ♥


End file.
